Andre Yoskowitz
11 Aug 2012 18:16
Google has updated their search algorithms, which should be really bad news for sites that engage in piracy.
Going forward, Google will begin taking into account the amount of valid copyright removal notices your site has received, downgrading sites with high numbers.
Reads Google's post: We aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily--whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.
Since we re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, we've been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, we're now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009--more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. We will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings.