In a move to combat piracy, Google will be taking into consideration the number of valid copyright removal notices they will receive for any given site in their search algorithms. Beginning next week, websites with high numbers of removal notices will start to appear lower in their results. Google is hoping that the implementation will help users find legitimate and quality sources of content more easily. Although the new signal will affect the ranking of search results, the company said that it will not be removing any pages from search results unless it will receive a valid copyright removal notice from the owner.
“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,” said Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google.
Filed in . Read more about Google.