Last week, the search giant punished rapgenius.com for trying to game its algorithm by scrubbing the site from its search results. Jay Yarow ponders the news:
It’s pretty crazy that Google can just do this to a company. How is this legal? Google is so essential to so many companies, and yet it’s virtually unregulated and can do what it wants to decimate a company. Rap Genius had better have been committing some seriously shady SEO tricks to get this sort of a punishment. Otherwise, this seems unfair.
This has to scare the crap out of Andreessen Horowitz which invested $15 million in Rap Genius. It’s not just that Google has nuked Rap Genius. Its Google rank will come back in time if it’s on good behavior. It’s the fact that Google can flip a switch and destroy Rap Genius. As Danny Sullivan noted when the Rap Genius mess kicked up, “it’s probably an incredibly dumb business model to be doing a lyrics site that hopes for Google traffic in a time when Google, like Bing, is moving toward providing direct answers. Lyrics, to my understanding, often have to be licensed. That makes them a candidate for Google to license directly and provide as direct answers.”
Alec Liu speculates as to how Rap Genius pissed Google off:
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.
Yglesias sees value in Google punishing sites that try to game its algorithm. But:
Google isn’t just a lucrative company with some popular products. It’s a powerful company whose Web index and search algorithm are part of the critical infrastructure of 21st-century life. Antitrust law to an extent constrains Google from using its power over search to advance Google’s other business interests. But Google apparently feels comfortable zapping a company like Rap Genius. There’s a lot of wiggle room here. What if executives start pursuing personal vendettas via the search process? Back in the old days of the telephone book, I take it that Ma Bell wouldn’t have been allowed to just make some particular business “disappear” from the white and yellow pages.
The Dish 