Not to argue with Aaron Wall on an SEO topic, but you read the same article I did. There were 200,000 total links to Rap Genius and most of them were legit. Only a small subset analyzed ended up being suspicious.
They got 200 webmasters to remove their links, a few didn't, and the rest ended up being "site scrapers" who steal other people's sites. They just added those to disavow. Seems like they acted very quickly to rectify every suspicious link they could find.
But yes, they got special treatment in having the manual penalty removed after only a few days. But it's a legitimately popular site. You'd expect Google to do that since its harming Google's own users during the penalty.
They got 200 webmasters to remove their links, a few didn't, and the rest ended up being "site scrapers" who steal other people's sites. They just added those to disavow. Seems like they acted very quickly to rectify every suspicious link they could find.
But yes, they got special treatment in having the manual penalty removed after only a few days. But it's a legitimately popular site. You'd expect Google to do that since its harming Google's own users during the penalty.