Gulp!

Traffic to Rap Genius has completely cratered since its tiff with Google.

Yesterday, the site had 234,590 unique visitors, according to Quantcast, which directly measures the site's traffic. On Monday, before it was knocked out of Google, it had 1,376,535 unique visitors.

Rap Genius used to deliver the top search results for song lyrics. Then it was caught gaming Google by asking random blogs to throw links to Rap Genius. This crude system helped its search ranking. (Google measures search results on a lot of signals, but one of the core signals is links pointing to a page.)

After Rap Genius confessed to do some shady search engine optimization tricks, Google pretty much wiped the site out of its search results. As a result the traffic has totally tanked.

This chart is pretty crazy, and fairly scary for Rap Genius and its investors.

We've been emailing Rap Genius for comment, but have heard nothing back so far. It seems it's not commenting so it doesn't upset Google further.