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Damn, this isn’t good.

Our friends at RapGenius aka. the “Wikipedia of rap lyrics” have taken a huge hit from the Google gods. After it was revealed the lyric site was manipulating Google SEO results with a back link shortcut, Google removed the site from its search results.

RapGenius apologized to Google, but not after taking a severe decline in traffic. In a written statement, RapGenius stated:

“We effed up, other lyrics sites are almost definitely doing worse stuff, and we’ll stop. 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.”

According to Business Insider, RapGenius’ traffic has declined more than 50 percent since Google caught on to their scheme.

Yesterday, the site had 234,590 unique visitors, according to Quantcast, which directly measures the site’s traffic. On Monday, before it was knocked out of Google, it had 1,376,535 unique visitors.

Rap Genius used to deliver the top search results for song lyrics. Then it was caught gaming Google by asking random blogs to throw links to Rap Genius. This crude system helped its search ranking. (Google measures search results on a lot of signals, but one of the core signals is links pointing to a page.)

Hopefully, RapGenius can get all this sorted out with Google.

SOURCE: BusinessInsider | Photo Credit: Mark Ostow/RapGenius