Google has made an example out of lyrics site Rap Genius, which was purportedly caught conducting a search engine optimization (SEO) spam operation.

In an attempt to stay afloat in the lyrics-hosting market, the company depends heavily on powerful hyperlinks, which it attempted to spread via its "Rap Genius Blog Affiliate" program.

Participants would embed a series of Rap Genius links to Justin Bieber lyrics in their blog, for example, in return for a promotional tweet from Rap Genius.

The quid-pro-quo system landed the foul-mouthed startup in hot water when Google knocked Rap Genius out of its top search results, pushing the direct site link to the second page of relevant search results.

Co-founders Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory this week posted an apology, saying that the company employs a small-scale strategy to find blogs whose followers would likely enjoy and ask them to link to Rap Genius pages.

"We actually thought we had set this up to be compliant with Google's linking policy in its Terms of Service, but we messed up and want to explain how," the team wrote.

Citing Google's guidelines, which explicitly prohibit "exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links," Rap Genius said the company has "never bought or sold links." The startup also said it did not engage in "excessive link exchanges" where it offered other site operators "'ink to me and I'll link to you" deals.

Perhaps, but the Rap Genius story doesn't seem to jibe with the tale told by blogger John Marbach, who recounted his interactions with Moghadam, including an email Marbach said came from the Rap Genius co-founder:

"If you have a dope post that you would like us to tweet outget you MASSIVE trafficthen put this HTML at the bottom of the post and send me the URL along with the EXACT text you want tweeted," Moghadam purportedly wrote in the email. "I will send that s**t out it will bloooowwwww up!"

Rap Genius's apology skipped right over its questionable link-sharing practices and instead argued that the startup's real mistake was in not ensuring that all posted links on its site were "natural," or relevant to the content on a given Web page rather than sneakily taking readers to unrelated pages.

According to Google, creating links that weren't editorially placed or vouched for by the site's ownera.k.a. "unnatural links" can be considered a violation of its terms.

"Though any links to our tracks that our fans put on their pages were editorially placed or vouched for by them, in some instances we have fallen short," Rap Genius said, adding that the site will "discourage things like this in the future."

The team also pinpointed other Google rules that it says Rap Genius does not break, including large-scale article marketing with keyword-rich anchor text links, or the use of automated programs to create site links.

Rap Genius did, however, place plenty of blame for its troubles on its competitors, pointing the finger at sites like A-Z Lyrics, MetroLyrics, LyricsFreak.com, Lyrics007, and LyricsMode.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Rap Genius is the product of many passionate communities collaborating to create a massive, living knowledge base for the world to enjoy," Moghadam, Lehman, and Zechory said. "We do not want to break Google's rules, and will do whatever it takes to learn them inside [and] out and comply with them."

Further Reading

Education Reviews