Starting this week, Google will begin taking into account the number of valid copyright removal notices received for any given site in its search rankings.
“Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results,” explains Google's senior VP of engineering, Amit Singhal. “This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.”
According to Singhal, Google is receiving and processing more than 4.3 million copyright removal notices per month. “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,” says Singhal.
Singhal adds that Google cannot determine whether a particular Web site does or does not violate copyright law. As a result, while the new signal will influence search rankings of some sites, Google will not remove any pages from search results unless a valid copyright removal notice is received from the rights owner.
“Only copyright holders know if something is authorised, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed,” says Singhal.
“We'll continue to provide 'counter-notice' tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We'll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals.”
Following the initial announcement, there was some speculation that YouTube would be one of the only sites to be exempt from the “pirate penalty”. Google has, however, since clarified that popular user-generated content sites may still fare well in the search rankings, because the penalty will be calculated in a more nuanced way to just copyright infringement reports alone.
YouTube was believed to be exempt from the new algorithm signal, because copyright infringements filed against it are handled through a separate YouTube copyright infringement system. Google has, however, now said infringement notices filed within YouTube will be combined with those filed against YouTube through the Google Search reporting system.
“We're treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings. That said, we don't expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites,” said Google in a statement.
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