
Rap Genius was trying to use its influence to get credible links back to itself on outside sites. This is why you see rando spam comments like “I made $7293 a week click here!” Nobody expects anybody to click that link when it shows up out of context under a Lil Reese video, but that link is engineered to look credible to Google. It’s a decent way to measure how useful the world considers a certain page but it’s also an easy thing to fake.

One of the factors Google uses to rank a page is how many outside links there are pointing to that page. They employ a lot of people to keep track of how accurate their scores are and to punish anyone who has artificially juiced their site’s value. Google, in turn, wants to keep providing the best search results.
RAP GENIUS HOW TO
When you search for something, it shows you the sites with the highest scores first.Īs people figure out how Google calculates their scores, they’ve also figured out how to game the system. Google scores every site on the entire internet on how authentic and valuable it is. Wright Williams: You make yourself look more important than you actually are. Noisey: What do you have to do to piss off Google? These answers are adapted from a conversation with my friend Wright Williams of Spam Genius, who does this stuff (“Search Engine Optimization”) professionally. So instead of dancing on Rap Genius’s grave, I’m going to do the positive thing and try to explain how they got kicked off Google in plain English.

A lot of people are probably confused about why it’s suddenly not showing up. But, for better or for worse, Rap Genius’s Google dominance has made it a fixture in hip-hop and I’ll admit its outreach to the likes of Nas and Big KRIT has helped its credibility.
