Unable to find Rap Genius without digging deep into Google results? Here’s why.

Earlier this week, lyric site Rap Genius posted an open call for “blog affiliates,” asking interested parties to add Rap Genius content to unrelated posts in exchange for traffic from their twitter account.

Blogger John Marbach wrote about the offer, describing it as a “growth hack” intended to game Google’s vaunted search algorithm. In turn, his post caught the eye of Google’s webspam czar Matt Cutts, who wrote on Hacker News that Google was “investigating this now.”

After investigating, Google torpedoed the rank of Rap Genius pages, banishing the site to the fifth or sixth page of Google search results, rather than the top-of-the-page results the site usually receives.

Rap Genius has posted an open letter to Google, a mea culpa that also implicates other lyric sites and implores Google to “take a closer look at the whole lyrics search landscape.” According to TechCrunch, the two sites are working on a resolution.

Lyric websites, and Rap Genius in particular, are not small potato operations anymore: Rap Genius received $15 million in venture capital last year and has had to work out licensing deals with music publishing companies after a spate of takedown notices.