BS.
What's good for Google is showing people that if you engage in bad practices your shit will get nuked from orbit, even if your site is better than the competitors.
You'd better believe that companies are going to avoid blackhat SEO in the future after this, and that's absolutely in Google's interests.
I think that anyone who characterizes google as needing one site over needing people to not blackhat will find that google really doesn't need said site. (Maybe Wikipedia is an exception to this rule?)
Can you find another example of the other lyrics sites pushing a quid pro quo scheme on Twitter?
The other lyrics sites might be scummy and Google doesn't care -- or they might just cover their tracks enough to avoid giving Google enough proof to hang them.
Isn't that precisely what rapgenius had done (affiliate linkscam notwithstanding)? They were already the top result for many lyrics queries, they just got greedy
A short penalty of a few days or weeks isn't much of a deterrent. It may suck for people searching lyrics now, but making the page rank penalty effectively toothless would suck for everyone.
And RG didn't just "screw up" by trying to game the system; they were blatantly cocky about it, so that's probably why Google felt they needed to step in and teach them a thing or two. Let's hope the lesson sticks, at least.
I work at an online marketing firm and I've seen dozens of companies come to us for help with the process. RapGenius shouldn't get preferential treatment.
I applaud Google for this, and that's the first time I've applauded Google in a while!
AZLyrics is a lot more appealing to me. Much lighter weight.