The First Rule of the Internet: Don’t Anger Google

You may have had trouble finding the words to Marshall Mathers’s latest hit single (which is excellent) over the weekend. That’s because Google wiped annotation site Rap Genius from the internet. Sure, you can technically load it up directly by going to www.RapGenius.com, but let’s be real: no one does that.

Where searching “Eminem Rap God lyrics” would have once loaded up the Silicon Valley-backed venture at the top of the search pile, it now gets you nada (notice we didn’t mention Bing). Even searching for Rap Genius proper only gets you links to articles about the company, like this Business Insider piece detailing the dispute. Having pissed off the world’s most popular search engine by employing what Google considers underhanded SEO practices, Rap Genius might as well not exist.

There’s two ways to look at this. On the one hand, this is Google exercising or, depending on who you ask, abusing its immense, monopolistic power over the web by censoring problematic pages from its dominant search index. On the other, it’s a company trying to deliver the best possible product (in this case search) being forced to make a statement by publicly shaming a player trying to game the system.

Google’s power is undeniable. With the push of a button, they’ve cut off 80 percent of the site’s traffic. For the buzzy Rap Genius, which raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz last year—or any firm that lives on the web for that matter—Mountain View’s fury is tantamount to a digital death sentence.

Google likes to flaunt the notion of transparency when it suits the company, but is decidedly opaque when it comes to its proprietary search algorithm. It’s the secret sauce after all, so we’ll never know for sure what Rap Genius did to induce the wrath of the SEO gods. But there’s enough evidence to make an educated guess, including this Facebook update, since removed, posted two days before Christmas.

Enterprising bloggers that took the bait received a friendly email from Mahbod Moghadam, one of Rap Genius’s co-founders, promising “MASSIVE traffic” if they were willing to insert some code into their posts.

Google's search rankings are based partially on the number of sites linking into the site in question, based on the valid assumption that sites that get linked to often are of higher quality than those that don't. It's a basic tenet of search engines everywhere, and attempts to game that principle—for example, by asking other people to link to a spammy smattering of your posts, rather than linking because your posts are actually useful—largely died out years ago.

Unearthing such a tired trick is a ballsy move considering Google’s handling of companies it believed were trying to game its results in the past. A week before Rap Genius’s fateful Facebook post, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts declared victory on Twitter over link network Backlinks.com. The week before that, it was Anglo Rank.

Google’s swift and ruthless response then was unsurprising. Given Rap Genius’s history of not giving a fuck, it’s also easy to see why they failed to heed those warnings. The public spanking however has gotten their attention. The founders, which also includes Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory, responded in an open letter.

“We effed up, other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff, and we’ll stop,” the founders wrote. “We’d love for Google to take a closer look at the whole lyrics search landscape and see whether it can make changes that would improve lyric search results.”

While it’s an admission of guilt, it’s not much of an apology, and Rap Genius remains adamant that they didn’t technically break any rules. Trading cash or goods and services for links is against Google’s terms of services. Though the intent is obvious, trading traffic falls into a gray area, and straddling that line is part of the hustle, prompting Rap Genius to highlight the firm’s relative innocence.

For Google, intent is more than enough, and the company has the power to not only write the rules but also clarify them after the fact.

Such power in the hands of one company is a scary thing to behold. But it’s important to add that this power isn’t unchecked despite Google’s clear monopoly. The company only wields this power if it continues to provide what users deem to be the best search product.

Taking a hard line against bad actors, even if the rule-breaking isn’t explicit, helps preserve that position. Making a public example of Rap Genius, which comes off as brazenly entitled, deters future manipulators. And as they’ve done in the past, Google will likely reinstate the site into its index once the two parties work things out.