The difficulty from the standpoint of Google is the absurd scale that they have to deal with. Indeed, a mission of indexing all information and making it immedi

The difficulty from the standpoint of Google is the absurd scale that they have to deal with. Indeed, a mission of indexing all information and making it immediately available is a daunting one. I get the sense that HN feels like these penalties are a rare thing; this type of ranking penalty is happening to an absurd amount of websites every day. If you were to rank the number of websites that received a manual penalty from Google on the same day as RapGenius by amount of traffic, my guess would be RapGenius wouldn't be in the top 10. They're not in a position to "negotiate" with Google, and Google doesn't "negotiate." They slap your wrist when they find you doing something dirty, and you try to recover your reputation. The only reason Google would try to work with RapGenius would be because of the PR RapGenius can generate, which appears to be happening, but there's no way they will just remove the penalty. My guess is at best RapGenius will get an expedited path to have the same options as any other site owner. The only recourse a website owner has when they have received a manual penalty is to disavow bad links, and hope that somehow they've identified all of the bad links in their link disavow. This is a nefarious process for even the best of SEOs, and the process is quite poor; I've even discussed this with Matt Cutts in the past, but it's understandable considering the scale Google has to deal with. You can't exactly have people taking phone calls. And in Google's defense, they only penalize you if you were trying something sketchy anyway, so it's your fault for playing with fire (except in the case of negative SEO, but that's another discussion). That said, while this ban will hurt RapGenius in the short-term, the penalty likely won't last forever. And considering that it doesn't appear that they're monetizing, it's not like they're losing revenue, just traffic for a short-term. Penalties like this, if properly disavowed, usually last about 30 days. Interestingly enough, I'm unsure how much the SEO spam would have helped RapGenius in the first place; all of the links would have had the exact same anchor text, which raises some red flags for Rap Genius. I'm not sure of the kind of scale they were trying to hit with the blogs, but it was likely either 1. Not going to move the needle or 2. Become so big it would hurt them. Even disregarding ethics of anti-black-hat SEO, it really was just a poor move on the part of Rap Genius SEO-wise. "Move fast and break stuff" can come back and bite you sometimes, but I'm confident RapGenius will figure it out in the end.