Google's Investigating Rap Genius For Using Spammy SEO to Grow Traffic
How has Rap Genius distinguished itself all the other lyrics sites? With sweet, sweet old school spam techniques, or at Silicon Valley likes to call it “growth hacking.” The tactic is so shady that Matt Cutts …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest round in a long cycle: back in 2009 Mahalo was caught running a PageRank-funneling link scheme, and Newsweek was writing about hot-wiring search rankings as far back as 2005 (Hotwiring Your Search Engine). Each generation of consumer web startups rediscovers that gaming Google is the cheapest growth channel — and each gets caught by the same webspam apparatus.
What makes this installment notable is who got caught and how they responded: Rap Genius, a high-profile, well-funded lyrics site, publicly apologized and invited Google to investigate the entire lyrics search business, effectively conceding that competitors were doing the same thing. The story traveled unusually fast for a holiday week — TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Search Engine Land, Business Insider and SEO Book all picked it up within a day.
First-order effects
- Rap Genius's lyrics pages face losing the Google rankings that supply its core search traffic, with Matt Cutts's web-spam team holding the decision.
- The founders are forced into direct negotiation with Google, having already issued a public apology before any penalty is announced.
Second-order effects
- Every other lyrics site that traded annotations-for-links now sits under the same spotlight — Rap Genius itself asked Google to audit the whole lyrics search category, not just its own domain.
- SEO commentators gain a template case contrasting how Google treats venture-backed 'growth hacking' versus the classic spam it penalized at Mahalo in 2009.
Third-order effects
- The episode sharpens a structural dependency: any startup whose growth model runs through organic Google results ultimately answers to one company's web-spam discretion, regardless of what Silicon Valley calls the tactic.
- If Google enforces the same standard across the lyrics vertical, category-wide rankings could reset and traffic would redistribute toward whichever players' link profiles survive the audit.
The trend: Consumer startups built on organic Google traffic keep colliding with Google's web-spam enforcement, leaving the search giant as the de facto arbiter of which growth tactics count as spam.