Google’s Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google’s DMCA system, from ranking well in Google’s listings. The filter is periodically updated. When this happens, sites previously impacted may escape, if they’ve made the right improvements. The filter may also catch new sites that escaped being caught before, plus it may release “false positives” that were caught.
Last week, we reported that Google will be pushing out an update to the Google Pirate Update in the upcoming weeks. It looks like Google pushed that update out a few days ago.
Torrent freak reports the update has impacted many torrent sites.
Here is a screen shot of the SEO visibility for the site torrentz.eu according to Search Metrics:
As you can see, SearchMetrics is reporting a keyword drop of about 68% for the popular European torrent site.
The owner of Isohunt.to told Torrentfreak, “earlier this week all search traffic dropped in half.” He shared this traffic graph, showing the decline in traffic over time to his site from Google:
What Is The Pirate Update?
The Pirate Update — similar to other updates like Panda or Penguin — works like a filter. Google processes all the sites it knows about through the Pirate filter. If it catches any deemed to be in violation, those receive a downgrade.
Anyone caught by this filter is then stuck with a downgrade until the next time it is run, when, presumably if they’ve received fewer or no complaints, they might get back in Google’s good graces. We don’t really know how that works yet, though, because Google has never rerun the Pirate Update filter.
That also means that anyone who might be in violation of what Pirate was aimed to catch has escaped any penalty since it first launched. Since it has never been rerun until now, it has never caught any new violators.
Fresh Attacks On Old System
This is what I pointed out last month, when a war-of-word serupted between News Corp and Google over online piracy. Google said it does much to fight piracy and made a reference to the Pirate filter. I noted that wasn’t a great defense, since the company had been tardy in maintaining that system:
Google has never announced a fresh run of its Pirate filter, so citing this feels odd. It means that for over two years now, Google’s not tried to rerun that system to catch new sites exhibiting such behavior.
News Corp has continued its war-of-words with Google in the weeks since. So Google, it seems, is finally getting back to attending to the Pirate Update that it has long neglected, lest that became further bad PR fodder.
New Ad Formats
New Ad Formats
Google also has just introduced a new ad display in relation to queries where people might try to download movies from pirate sites:
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