[MitziMoto]

I agree that Rap Genius should have been penalized here, but so should literally every other lyrics site on the net. I've done SEO in hyper competitive spaces in the past and honestly, the system is broken.

Google and Cutts love to preach this "Create value and quality content and you'll rank high" bullocks but it doesn't work like that. When you have a high number of well funded competitors who are all playing dirty, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to compete with them with white hat tactics. You either play hardball yourself and risk a ban or you play nice and get creamed in the SERPs.

It's really a rock | hard place situation in some niches.

Oh, and I just saw the founders made this statement:

"We are working with Google right now to resolve this. They've been really great, helping us identify changes we need to make, even on Christmas. We’re working on it as fast as we can, and expect to be back on Google very soon."

WHAT? What makes these guys so special that they actually get help from Google. I think that pisses me off more than anything. There are a ton of webmasters out there trying to do the right thing SEO wise who get banned or penalized but could never, ever, get personal help from Google. We don't even get the courtesy of knowing why we've been banned most of the time. (Although to be fair this has gotten much better in GWT).

[johnward]

In some highly competitive spaces your competitors will spam links to your site which eventually leads to negative SEO. Which I don't think Google will admit exists but it happens.