Rap Genius gets punished by Google for link scheme

RapGenius.com has become a force to be reckoned with within the hip-hop community on the internet, thanks to its huge collection of rap lyrics and tools that allow you to make awesome graphs of hip-hop analytics. That rising stardom may have hit a significant speed bump when a journalist pointed out that the site was using some sketchy methodology to draw hits to its website.

John Marbach, a writer for SearchEngineLand.com, called out the site for reaching out to amateur bloggers to carry out a "link scheme" in order to build RapGeniuses' hits. The site would advertise to bloggers that if they included links to rapgenius.com that included Justin Bieber lyrics, Rap Genius would then it turn tweet a link to that blogger's site. The blogger would inevitably see a rise in visits thanks to the tweet, and Bieber's popularity would lead those viewers to follow the links to Rap Genius.

The problem is that Google doesn't allow such scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours schemes, and punishes sites that take part in them. Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said on Thursday that Rap Genius will automatically be relegated to the second page of search results, regardless of the search terms. As of this morning, if you search "Rap Genius" on the search engine, links to the service's Twitter and Facebook pages will come up, however links to the site itself don't show up until page two.

RapGenius at least had the courtesy to admit to wrongdoing ("we effed up"), and promised to quit the scheme. However, they encouraged Google to look into other sites that they claimed "are almost definitely doing worse stuff."