The rise of the internet brought along with it lots of different kinds of advantages, but there were also some unforeseen consequences that started to occur. A site like YouTube where you can post videos without having to jump through any hoops was bound to revolutionize human communication and content creation alike, but it also meant that people could start uploading videos of copyrighted films and other forms of content which might have made piracy really easy from that point of view.
This is where the DMCA came in. It is a digital copyright enforcement law that was put into place in 1998, and it legally requires companies like YouTube to detect and remove any copyrighted content that gets uploaded to this platform. Since YouTube is a massive platform that sees hundreds of hours of content uploaded every single minute, suffice it to say that human content checkers were not going to make the cut and algorithms were put in place to automatically detect and take down copyrighted content.
Google has taken its DMCA takedown algorithm very seriously indeed, and a new update to the algorithm is going to result in sites that have multiple violations getting demoted in terms of search engine rankings and the like. That means that people that want to be able to take advantage of high quality SEO will have to make sure that they do not violate the DMCA, or at least avoid doing so often enough that it would end up impacting their search engine rankings down the line.
The way that this update works is that whenever Google’s algorithm detects numerous takedowns on a site, the site will then be demoted and it will start receiving up to 89% less traffic than would have otherwise ended up being the case. This is obviously a really massive number, and it will be difficult for these sites to continue operating in an effective enough manner. Since the reduction in potential traffic is so huge, chances are that this would be a somewhat effective deterrent that would reduce the incidences of copyright violation at least in theory.
There are of course going to be concerns regarding whether or not these things are even all that valid, but suffice it to say that the algorithm will only demote a site if it receives a number of legitimate takedowns that are backed by law. There is still a chance that this system could be misused, but that will likely not be an issue as long as Google keeps things up to date and it will be interesting to see if it has a positive impact in that regard.
H/T: TF.
Read next: Google changed its search engine theme first to grey and now to pitch black
This is where the DMCA came in. It is a digital copyright enforcement law that was put into place in 1998, and it legally requires companies like YouTube to detect and remove any copyrighted content that gets uploaded to this platform. Since YouTube is a massive platform that sees hundreds of hours of content uploaded every single minute, suffice it to say that human content checkers were not going to make the cut and algorithms were put in place to automatically detect and take down copyrighted content.
Google has taken its DMCA takedown algorithm very seriously indeed, and a new update to the algorithm is going to result in sites that have multiple violations getting demoted in terms of search engine rankings and the like. That means that people that want to be able to take advantage of high quality SEO will have to make sure that they do not violate the DMCA, or at least avoid doing so often enough that it would end up impacting their search engine rankings down the line.
The way that this update works is that whenever Google’s algorithm detects numerous takedowns on a site, the site will then be demoted and it will start receiving up to 89% less traffic than would have otherwise ended up being the case. This is obviously a really massive number, and it will be difficult for these sites to continue operating in an effective enough manner. Since the reduction in potential traffic is so huge, chances are that this would be a somewhat effective deterrent that would reduce the incidences of copyright violation at least in theory.
There are of course going to be concerns regarding whether or not these things are even all that valid, but suffice it to say that the algorithm will only demote a site if it receives a number of legitimate takedowns that are backed by law. There is still a chance that this system could be misused, but that will likely not be an issue as long as Google keeps things up to date and it will be interesting to see if it has a positive impact in that regard.
H/T: TF.
Read next: Google changed its search engine theme first to grey and now to pitch black