Google Just Made Rap Genius Disappear

This article acts like Rap Genius just got put out of business by Google. That is not what happened. They've suffered a serious short term penalty that will fade, and assuming they clean up their SEO mess, six months from now it'll be like this never happened.

In SEO, all PR is good PR, the amount of links they are getting from all this news coverage could easily make them rebound from this. They need to cease these practices, disavow links and they'll be back, even stronger. Reminds me of that sunglasses website that was ranking really well even after the negative press. Obviously in that case Google had to do something drastic to save face. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?_r=...

This is nothing but a media trial. If this didn't blow up on HN, it would have been largely ignored by Google and they would have just gotten away with a slap on the wrist.

Google likes to do this to send a message, but the funny thing is they do this to ACT like it doesn't matter who is breaking their guidelines, could be Fortune 500 or even Google itself, they will penalize you.

But the reality is that in each and every case, once the media moves on to the next shiny thing, the penalties were reversed:

http://searchengineland.com/interflora-gets-google-rankings-... http://searchengineland.com/90-days-later-google-lets-j-c-pe... http://searchengineland.com/google-chromes-paid-link-penalty...

Spamming and grey hat SEO practices are like speeding, everyone does it, but only a few get caught.

Is all this media coverage making rapgenius more popular?

I can't believe Google actually did that. They just proved that they can do whatever they want with no justification what so ever. They just proved that they aren't a service provider anymore, they're a service controller that will, if it wants to, filter the flux of information and let through only parts of the internet.

Rap Genius is still #1 at Bing. I wonder if people these days think something doesn't exist if its not on Google.

I can't believe it. I just searched google (public results on btw) for "Rap Genius". Their homepage wasn't even in the first 10 results. All links to news articles. Wow.

what about others that are doing the same thing.

for example TINT

tintup.com

once you create a free account they have the following:

Dear valued Tint customer, Would you like to write a review about Tint? In exchange for your opinions/blog post, we are giving away 50% off FOREVER promo code for our Plus Plan. To learn more, click the button below:

screen shot: http://imgur.com/wDnAJ4c