Last week Google announced that the number of valid copyright infringement notices will become a negative ranking factor within the SERPS.  The idea is the more valid copyright complaints they get about a site the more difficult it will be for that site to rank naturally. It’s a great move in many ways however I question the effectiveness for written content and I feel to tackle the problem properly it would need an element of automation.

In the announcement they showed the scale of copyright complaints have spiked alarmingly over the last year. In fact they get more copyright removal notices now in a single day than they got in the whole of 2009. To illustrate the scale of the problem Google got over 5 million requests from the copyright owners in July 2012. The main copyright complainants are unsurprisingly major software and music companies with Microsoft heading up the list of top complainants. (more…)