Rap Genius is a website for users to submit interpretations or explanations of rap lyrics in songs. It was founded in 2009 and in late 2013, began using questionable back-linking strategies.

As a way for them to expedite the process to reach the top of search engine results, Rap Genius employed a technique of asking bloggers with high page ranks to include HTML at the end of their posts with links to Rap Genius in exchange for tweets and Facebook posts.

On the surface, this transaction appeared to be mutually beneficial for both parties involved. Rap Genius would be able to have their most powerful links reside on pages with high page ranks and bloggers would be able to get their content out to a much wider audience.

THE PENALTY

The penalty was handed down from Google in December 2013. Rap Genius was nowhere to be found on the top rankings, apart from their Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia pages. However, there was no shortage of articles covering the penalty.

THE AFTERMATH

Rap Genius issued an apology and vowed to clean up their link building and SEO schemes. Ten days later, they returned to their spot atop the search engines, at least for their name.

Recently, Rap Genius has undergone a rebranding and now goes by Genius and has recovered, if not fared better, following the penalty after numerous websites began linking to them following the fiasco.

QUESTIONS TO KEEP IN MIND

While websites like Rap Genius can recover from penalties, others may not be so lucky. Eschewing from black hat techniques is one way, but also keeping in mind some questions when performing SEO is important.

Google released guidelines in May 2011 for webmasters and SEOs alike to help guide others to build high-quality websites. Some of the questions in the guidelines are:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

WHAT DOES THIS IMPLY?

In the beginning, SEOs optimized for search engines. Now, the focus is solely on optimizing for the human eyes. Blog posts or content that looks even remotely "spammy" should be avoided.