Google Makes Public Example of Rap Genius Web Site

On Christmas Day while most of us were unwrapping cherished gifts from loved ones, popular lyrics Web site Rap Genius was unwrapping a lump of coal in the form of lost rankings due to a manual penalty slap by Google. Traffic on the site plummeted by over 70% when it was discovered that the site had been operating a link scheme targeting bloggers, which was disguised as an affiliate program.

Here's how Rap Genius got into trouble. First, they promoted the blog affiliate program on their social channels in posts that look like this:

Interested bloggers were directed to contact founder Mahbod Maghadam for more information. One well-known blogger, John Marbach, did just that and then detailed the entire exchange with Mahbod on his blog two days before Christmas.

Mahbod explained to John that the program worked by having bloggers write-up posts that contained as many as a dozen anchor text rich links back to popular artist and song queries on the Rap Genius Web site. Rap Genius would then tweet out the posts through their official account.

Needless to say, the above is a clear violation of Google's link scheme guidelines, specifically the following:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link”

“Additionally, creating links that weren't editorially placed or vouched for by the site's owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines.”

When Rap Genius publically stated that they would tweet out specific posts from blog owners that contained anchor text rich links they provided what constituted a services exchange and thus classified the links as unnatural. Further, these links did not have an editorial component and in most cases were placed within blog posts that had absolutely nothing to do with the links themselves.

It didn't take lon...