After Google Panda and Penguin, from this week another site ranking signal is being considered for calculating Google pagerank against each site. This is in addition to all those existing 200 ranking signals that are being used by the Search Giant.
According to Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Google, number of DMCA requests or valid copyright removal notices for each URL will be counted, and used in determining its ranking or visibility on results pages. However Google will not remove any pages from the search results, unless it receives a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner.
What is DMCA?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) request is usually used by copyright owners to claim copyright infringement on content found or copied on the internet. As per statistics given by Google, they processed nearly 4.3 million URLs removal request last month under this act. A total of 28,388 domains were specified including filestube.com, isohunt.com, downloads.nl, etc on the top of the list.
What If I’m Not Guilty
Since Google is not authorized to decide whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law, any claimed page won’t be removed from results until the court confirms the same. But the claimed site will definitely suffer from influence of those complaints in due time. So, Google will continue to provide the “counter-notice tools” for those sites who believe their content has been wrongly removed or not violated the copyright infringement rule.
On the Transparency Report Portal, you can check other details like if someone has alleged you under this act.