The Latest in IT Security

Rap Geniuss three co-founders have a new reason to pop bottles this weekend: theyve reportedly resolved their issues with Google, according to a lengthy new blog post detailing how they messed up and how they fixed the problem. Last month, Google penalized Rap Genius for using spammy SEO techniques, pushing links to the popular lyrics website further down in Google search results and causing traffic to Rap Genius to plummet.  Rap Genius quickly apologized and promised to amend its ways (We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked, the co-founders say again in todays blog post), and the mea culpa appears to have worked. It takes a few days for things to return to normal, but we’re officially back! the Rap Genius co-founders write. But as their blog post details, it apparently took a lot of analytics work on their part to get back in Googles good graces. As the Rap Genius co-founders explain, their site was penalized by Googles PageRank system for the offense of having unnatural links to your site, in this case, links that came from blog posts that featured Rap Genius lyrics out of context, which Rap Genius nonetheless promised to promote.