DMCA Takedown Penalty Added As New Factor In Google Ranking

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DMCA Takedown Penality Factor In Google Ranking
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Plagiarism and piracy is something which is not new to the Internet.

Every day, we see lots of torrents and pirated content on the web. For a blogger, seeing their content copied somewhere is nothing new and we often file a DMCA takedown request to remove such content from web index. Especially after the First Google panda launch, plagiarism content becomes an issue and we have seen sites copying content ranked higher in many cases.

In the last year and a half, Google has made some major Search engine algorithm updates and changes to make the search engine smarter.

In fact, these days I hardly see any copy-paste bloggers rank higher in the search. Now, here is a good news for those bloggers and webmasters who are tired of seeing people copying posts from your blog and still ranking higher in search.

Google DMCA May Lead To Domain Level Penalty

In the last 1 year alone, I have reported over 2000 links to Google to remove from the web. Here is an exact step by step guide to file a request to Google for DMCA takedown.

Amit Singhal, SVP, Google, added about the latest search engine ranking factor, which will lower down the ranking of a site if it has received a large number of DMCA request.

In an official blog post, Amit mentioned:

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.

This means the search engine ranking of any site which receives lots of DMCA takedown requests will be dropped. Pirated and warez sites will be especially be affected as a result of the new update and may lower down the percentage of pirated content we see in the search engine. Though, I doubt if Google will lower down the ranking of YouTube (Google’s product), despite the fact that YouTube keeps getting pirated and copyright video takedown request.

DMCA Google penalized sites
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To add to the transparency of DMCA removal requests, you can check out this page by Google, where you can see all the websites that have received DMCA removal requests.

A quick scan will show, that most of the torrent, free file upload sites, mp3 sites have a huge number of DMCA removal request as a result of which we can see their ranking going down in the search engine. You can also check the list of pending and recent DMCA removal request by others.

What DMCA Penalty Means For You As A Blogger

Most bloggers ignore when someone copies their content, but it’s the wrong approach.

There is no point in letting someone taking advantage of your hard work. If someone copies your content, you can use Google DMCA site and report all such content. If you are not sure how to find such content, you can take help of plagiarism checker websites.

Services like Copyscape will get a great boost with this new DMCA search engine penalty, as it’s one of the best tool to check for copied content.

Here is another catch. Google usually doesn’t entertain automated blogs, that copies partial content. In such cases, you can use RSS footer plugin to add a credit link back to your site.

Also, if you have copied content in the starting days of Blogging (Common blogging mistakes), you should consider deleting all such content, to avoid getting penalized for copied content. You can simply delete all such content and use the Google webmaster removal tool to put a request to quickly remove content from web index.

Here is a video that I recorded a while ago, which will show how you can put a removal request for copied content:

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If your site has received a DMCA takedown message, simply use the chilling effects guide to initiate counter-notice.

This is a great step taken by Google to fight piracy, as lowering the rankings will decrease the search engine visibility of your site.

There is no denying the fact that people use a search engine to find pirated content (movies, songs, software keys, etc.), and by lowering down the visibility of pirated websites in Google search, download hungry users may head to other search engines like Bing.

If you have been penalized for any past update, here are some of the guides, which you shouldn’t miss:

What’s your view on the update from Google? Do you think it will make Google search better? Write to us.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

8 thoughts on “DMCA Takedown Penalty Added As New Factor In Google Ranking”

  1. Pranjal

    Though, I was not reporting earlier for sites posting my original content but from now onwards I would start submitting to DMCA take-down request.

  2. funloldaily

    It a good news for bloggers who work hard on their website but not get best results.

  3. Hafeez Ansari

    Very good decision of Google and thank you for keep us informed. 🙂

  4. Istiak Rayhan

    Though free file hosting sites may become a victim of this, I think it’s a good decision from Google to fight against piracy.

  5. Sachin Kundu

    Nice Start by Google, i am happy there are lots of pirated domains movies sites ranked very high. One of my friend producing movie always being afraid of copyright issue over internet.

  6. Nizam

    Using RSS footer plugin to add a credit backlink and TYNT script to get free links for copied content are good strategies to implement for automated blogs that copies partial content. And copyscape is really a great tool to check if the content has been copied and it is really useful. Thanks Harsh for this informative post 🙂

  7. Deepak

    Ya harsh it happened once with my blog one guy was coping all content with the link to his site making URL changes. And I was shocked that he also had google ads though he was doing such activities. But i dint tried to do complaint but I talked politely with that guy and he removed all copied content from his blog. But since after that I decided that as mine blog will grow chances of getting copied will be more and I will be soon taking advantage of DMCA service.
    While this article is really informative.

  8. Chris

    Sometimes our blog post considered as plagiarism by googlebot although we are not. Therefore blogger should use plagiarism checker before publish their post to remove duplicate sentence. Best plagiarism checker i think plagium.com after copyscape. thank you

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