After learning the startup Rap Genius had been using SEO spam practices to attain top spots is search results, Google retaliated by destroying the lyric site's search rankings, TechCrunch reported.
The startup Website, dedicated to the annotation and interpretation of song lyrics, doesn't appear on the first page of results for searches like "Rap Genius" and searches requesting lyrics of popular songs don't bring up the Website like they used to.
In a statement released earlier this week, Rap Genius founders said their main SEO strategy was to "create an amazing experience for users and hope they prefer us to all other lyrics sites and link to us. We believe that any unbiased user would prefer the Rap Genius version over the alternatives - and that this advantage in quality is responsible for the majority of our search traffic."
Google became aware of Rap Genius's SEO technique's earlier this week after former Thiel Fellow and Y Combinator alum John Marbach posted an email on his blog from Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam detailing the startup's little-known affiliate program. In the email, Moghadam instructed Marbach said to help boost the affiliate program's Google SEO traffic by adding tagged links to Rap Genius's Justin Bieber pages to the bottom of a given post on a blog, guaranteeing "Massive traffic," TechCrunch reported.
The Verge reported that Marbach's post garnered a lot of support on the Hacker News link board, where it came to the attention of Matt Cutts, a Google engineer in charge of webspam.
"We're looking into it," Cutts posted on the comment thread. Shortly after, results at RapGenius.com plummeted in Google's Search results.
The Rap Genius founders issued a lengthy apology detailing their practices in response to these allegations. They also attempted to bring their competitors down with them too, calling attention to their egregious practices also.
"We do not want to break Google's rules," the statement reads, "and will do whatever it takes to learn them inside out and comply with them."