Rap Genius is a site to find lyrics for popular songs, poems, and many other art forms, but recently Google had removed the site from search results. Rap Genius was using a genius and illegal way to boost themselves to top of search results. “The dubious-sounding ‘Rap Genius blog affiliate program,’ has caused them a lot of pain and lack of traffic recently.
The affiliate program was a lazy way to boost their reach and something that Google highly dislikes because it is someone scamming their brilliant algorithms. This was a stunt by Google in many ways to take a strong stance against people trying to scam the search engine giant. Google power play is to hopefully scare away the smaller people from doing something like this, because Google cannot catch everyone trying to game the system.
The hard part fro the company to regain their place in Google was to remove all the spam links, but keeping the natural links in place. Rap Genius had to email several hundred bloggers and webmasters to get the spammy links removed. While I admire the founders of Rap Genius for growing their site, but this play really brought some negative light from fellow webmasters.