[wiwillia]

Come on man, this whole thread/article is pretty ridiculous.

I'm a fan of RapGenius as well, but the whole underlying theory of Google is that the more people that organically link to something, the more valuable that content will be for someone searching key terms. You and I don't define what's "optimal" for everyone's search results, that's supposed to happen organically via legitimate link sharing (and it's the reason Google has grown to be the leading search engine, and that all major search engines now use similar logic).

To say that Google is doing something wrong for enforcing it's rules about organic links, just because you (or I) believe the results are more valuable, does not make that true for everyone.

Who do you expect to police this? Who is going to say what sites are breaking the rules for the sake of "optimizing everyones search results" and which ones are breaking them to optimize their revenue/valuation?

I'm a big fan of RapGenius, and I'll continue to use their service, but this was a shady SEO technique that backfired on them and I believe they know that. They'll be penalized for a week or two, remove the shady links, then have the penalty removed and be fine. I hope that other lyrics sites that are engaging in similar behavior get punished as well so we can try to maintain the quality of search.