On Christmas morning, Google has taken action against Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. Rap Genius had been using link schemes to manipulate Google’s ranking. After a while, it was brought to Google’s attention, and Matt Cutts said that they knew of it and were looking into it.
The “affiliate program” that was the link scheme, was what got Rap Genius in trouble.
The founders of Rap Genius did apologize, saying:
“We effed up, other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff, and we’ll stop. We’d love for Google to take a closer look at the whole lyrics search landscape and see whether it can make changes that would improve lyric search results.”
At this point, if you were to try searching for rapgenius.com, you wouldn’t find them. Sure, you could find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia profile and stories about them getting in trouble by Google, but you wouldn’t find their site on the first page.
http://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized-rap-genius-for-link-schemes-180777