If you want an illustration of just how powerful Google is, you need look no further than the search giant’s impact on Rap Genius, the hip-hop lyrics website that Google recently accused of trying to game its search engine optimization (SEO) system. Tech Rampage has posted a chart from Quantcast showing what happened to Rap Genius’s traffic in the days after Google decided to punish it for its alleged misdeeds… and it’s not pretty.
As you can see, Rap Genius’s traffic plummeted from the 1.5 million unique users range all the way down to the 250,000 unique users range over the span of just a few days. In other words, Google has killed off around 80% of Rap Genius’s traffic just through punishing it in its search rankings.
When you take this into account then you can see why Microsoft and other tech companies have been raising hell about Google allegedly promoting its own services over its competitors in its search rankings: A good search ranking on Google can literally mean the difference between life and death for websites’ traffic.
