Rap Genius Google rankings have dropped dramatically. Google, the top internet search engine, punished Rap Genius for spamming their search with tricky SEO tactics.

Rap Genius is a startup lyric site that was funded by Andreessen Horowitz $15 million. Rap Genius was caught trying to game Google to get higher search rankings. Google search rankings are determined by a lot of different things, but one of the biggest factors is how many sites are link back to the site.

Google found that Rap Genius was using dubious SEO tricks to pull top spots in search results. Google punished RapGenius.com by dropping their search results. A search of "Rap Genius" will no longer pull the lyric site to the first pages.

Rap Genius was founded in 2009. The site users explain song lyrics and other related material. Rap Genius made headlines in late 2012 when it got a huge cash infusion of $15 million from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The Rap Genius founders became infamous for their outrageous behavior.

Rap Genius invited bloggers to join its "Rap Genius Blog Affiliate" program earlier this week. John Marbach, who started Glider, an email filtering startup, asked for details and Rap Genius said it would tweet links to Marbach's blog, but in return Marbach would have to put links to Rap Genius' Justin Bieber lyrics on his blog. The links would fool Google into propping up Rap Genius result rankings to the top of Google searches during the holidays.

But instead Marbach blogged about Rap Genius' tactics. Marbach published the email Rap Genius sent. Matt Cutts from Google announced on Hacker News, "We're investigating this now." Rap Genius issued an open letter to Google saying it was sorry, but said shady SEO tactics were common on lyric sites.

This morning Google punished Rap Genius by wiping it out of its search results.

Even if you look up Rap Genius, RapGenius.com comes up on the bottom of the sixth page of results. This story here might wind up higher than RapGenius.com in a google search for "Rap Genius."

Rap Genius is working with Google to straighten this all out. They put out 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. It sucks to be off Google for us and for the thousands of our community members who have worked so hard to create what's often the best search result. We hope everyone who reads this will take a little time out from their Christmas and head to Rap Genius and sign up so you can contribute your knowledge on your favorite subjects - becoming a member of our community makes the site way more fun. Merry Christmas"