For years entertainment industry groups have lobbied search engines to penalize sites that link to a high number of copyrighted files, and today Google has given in to their demands. The search engine will soon take into consideration the number of DMCA takedown notices it receives against sites to determine the ranking of those websites in its search results. “Starting next week, 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,” Google’s Amit Singhal writes in a blog post . Earlier this year Google decided to publish all takedown requests online as part of their transparency report, and they will now use this data as part of their search algorithm.

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Google Starts Punishing “Pirate” Sites In Search Results