After a dispute in which Rap Genius self-deemed themselves as overstepping their boundaries and deserving “to get smacked,” Google reinstated Rap Genius’ SEO rankings.
The lyric website giant issued a statement recently explaining their actions saying:
“To Google and our fans: we’re sorry for being such morons. We regret our foray into irrelevant unnatural linking. We’re focused on building the best site in the world for understanding lyrics, poetry, and prose and watching it naturally rise to the top of the search results.” The statement would go on to explain what happened in their eyes and promised their “misguided SEO strategies” would not happen again.
Originally, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, chose to remove the lyrics-dedicated website from being included on the first page of Google when a search is performed. They were accused of using a link scheme disguised as an “affiliate” program to alter their rankings on Google and specifically siting Rap Genius’ lyric pages that contained songs off of Justin Bieber’s newly-released album, Journals.
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Rap Genius was also targeted by the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) to either obtain licenses to publish lyrics or remove copyright lyrics from their sites.
Read Rap Genius’ full statement here.
