SEO Werkt!

Google announced last week that it will start penalizing websites that violate copyrights on a consistent basis. In other words, if a certain website is found to be violating copyrights of other people regularly it will lose search rankings and possibly even be removed from Google’s index.

They will calculate the number of copyright infringements based on the amount of DMCA takedown notices that Google receives from content owners. Here’s a quotation from a Search Engine Land article explaining the process:

But as it turns out, there is a way that Google can guestimate if there’s copyright infringement happening, by making use of Digital Millennium Copyright Act “takedown” requests.

These requests are one of the ways to get content removed from Google. Anyone can file a request. It’s not proof of copyright infringement. It’s merely an allegation, and one that can be challenged. But Google evaluates each request, and if deemed valid, content is removed.

The requests are a pain to file, and they only remove an individual web page. If you’re a big entertainment company, it’s like playing Whac-A-Mole. But now, Google’s shift will change the game from a page-by-page basis to a site-by-site one. Beginning next week, a site will a lot of requests against individual pages will find all of its pages ranking lower in Google.

Overall I think it’s a valid measure, and it should certainly help to control the levels of content theft and plagiarism around the web.

I don’t think the update will have a large impact on small publishers, though, but hey at least you have one more weapon now to fight against people ripping off your content.

What do you think?

Late Friday, Google tried to quietly announce, in a transparent way, a new factor to be added to Google’s search quality signals. The new factor is DMCA requests, where Google will look to lower the rankings of sites with many many valid DMCA takedown requests in the search results.

I posted about this on Friday at Search Engine Land and Danny renamed the update to The Emanuel update as a tribute to how Google is trying to hve goodwill with Hollywood.

In any event, from my understanding of this new factor, it will only impact the top top violators and not impact those with just a few or even hundreds. It really seems to be targeting the top tier of sites that get these notifications. The algorithm has not yet launched yet, so it is hard to tell if that will be in fact true, but that is the impression I am getting from Google.

Google said:

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 itâs a song previewed on NPRâs music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.

Danny has written about this extensively since the topic of how with this impact YouTube or Blogger has been brought up. Yes, Google owns both and both would receive tons of DMCA requests because of the nature of the web site. Danny spoke with Google about that concern and he wrote Google: Many Popular Sites Will Escape Pirate Penalty, Not Just YouTube.

Of course, SEOs and webmasters are concerned. Whenever a new algorithm is pushed out, there is reason for concern. If you want to join those asking questions and express your concern, hit the forums. But I honestly believe most webmasters won’t see anything from this. I’d be surprised if this impacted more than 1,000 web sites on the web.

I would not be surprised if this lead to a new SEO service for reporting DMCA takedowns at a high high level.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google+ and Google Webmaster Help.

In a recent announcement, Google stated that they plan to begin penalizing websites that receive a high number of valid copyright removal notices. On Friday morning, Amit Singhal, who is a Google Fellow and the Senior VP of Engineering, posted the following regarding the algorithm update: “Starting next week, we will begin taking into account [...]

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Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google announced today that they’re updating their search algorithms to account for sites that get a lot of copyright removal notices, moving them further down the list of results. More »

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WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg just announced that the WordPress.com interface and all the blogs hosted on the site are now optimized for high-density displays like the ones found on Apple’s new iPad and Retina MacBook Pro. Through JetPack 1.6, which also launched today, users with self-hosted WordPress sites can also enable the same functionality.

The arrival of these high dots-per-inch (HiDPI) devices took many developers by surprise and while many Mac apps, for example, have already been optimized for Retina displays, most developers are still playing catch-up. Things are even worse on the Web. As Mullenweg notes, most web sites “don’t have high-resolution equivalents of all their graphics to take advantage of the new screen, so they get “doubled” and look fuzzy, they stand out like a sore thumb.”

With this update, WordPress.com will now serve high-resolution images on its blogs for all users who can see them. To do this, says Mullenweg, WordPress will take the images its users have uploaded and then sized down to fit their theme and serve them at a more Retina-optimized resolution. The WordPress team also optimized the dashboard, reader and all of its own sites to take advantage of these new high-density displays.

As for self-hosted blog, WordPress plans to integrate all of these Retina improvements into its upcoming 3.5 release, but for the time being, users will have to enable these features through Jetpack. Besides Retina support, the latest version of JetPack also introduces Pinterest share buttons.

Gravatar, too, is now Retina-ready and, as the company puts it, its users’ profile images will now “be looking extra sharp to anyone who views [a] Gravatar profile or Hovercard from a device like the iPhone 4.”