Google Began The New Year By Continuing Its Brutal Punishment Of Rap Genius

Google is unrelenting in its punishment of Rap genius, the crazy/brilliant song lyrics encyclopedia site. The chart above from Quantcast shows how its traffic has been decimated in the last few days.

Last month, Google caught Rap Genius seeding other web pages with links to its site - a no-no in the search engine business. Google only wants to see natural "organic" links from sites pointing their users to useful content.

So Google has dinged Rap Genius from its search results pages. The punishment does not just extend to RapGenius.com. It covers the site's internal pages for individual songs and bands, too, according to SEO Land. It is almost impossible to find Rap Genius on Google now. In fact, you have to click to the sixth Google results page before you get anywhere near a Rap Genius page - and even then it's for Rap Genius Poland: