Google Asked To Take Down Over 1.2 Million URLs Last Month From Search Results

May 24, 2012 at 3:49pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced they have enhanced the Google Transparency Report to include the removal requests to take down individual search results from showing up in Google.

In fact, Google has told us in the past month they have received 1,246,713 removal requests from 24,129 different target domains of 1,296 copyright owners by 1,087 reporting organizations. So only just over a thousand copyright owners submitted removal requests and top five include Microsoft with over a half a million URL removal requests last month followed by British Recorded Music Industry, NBC Universal, Elegant Angel and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America).

Here is a chart showing the increase in removal requests by week:

Google said they respond to these requests incredibly quickly, often in less than 11 hours.

Google lists all these details on this transparency report site, showing that the top five targeted domains include filestube.com, torrentz.eu, 4shared.com, zippyshare.com and kat.ph. In fact, Google lists each take down request for anyone to see and updates the numbers and reports daily.

Overall the data goes back to July 2011.

Google has not informed us the number of false claims being issued but said they do offer a way to counter notice on these take down requests. Google did say they do comply with 97% of the take down requests.

For more details, check out the copyright removal request section of the Google Transparency Report.

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Legal | Google: Web Search | Legal: Copyright

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://twitter.com/Gail_Kent Gail Kent

Thanks for these numbers – visual artists have to keep focus on copyright issues
http://www.alexseo.se/ Alexander Edbom

It’s not the artists that request take downs…
http://www.esparkinfo.com/ Nitesh Ahir

ohhhhhhh that’s huge data…

great work / analysis… Barry Schwartz ..
its good to see that how many data is been remove by the user generated…
http://www.facebook.com/altherrweb Joey Altherr

Funny how this takes Google 11 hours or less, but my last reinclusion request, after having a site hacked and then cleaned up, took 2 months for them to look at and put back up.
http://twitter.com/MaydayPictures Meredith Nunnally

I’ve filed several DMCA removal requests and some on the Blogger form, and I too was very surprised to have Google respond very quickly. The DMCA removal request shows up in the SERPs when I do a search and the results were previously shown. I haven’t decided whether I like that feature or not as it just makes it more public to the person (and the world) whose URL was removed and they might try to retaliate.
MeyerKaty

my friend’s aunt brought home $17621 last month. she gets paid on the internet and bought a $566900 condo. All she did was get blessed and work up the guide revealed on this web site===>> ⇛⇛⇛⇛► http://getitmust.blogspot.com/m
KramerEdward77

my friend’s aunt brought home $17621 last month. she gets paid on the internet and bought a $566900 condo. All she did was get blessed and work up the guide revealed on this web site===>> ⇛⇛⇛⇛► http://enternet-Job.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/#!/david_frankk David Frankk

What i wonder is, why the number of links to be removed is increasing. And when each link is removed, can it be indexed again via another site or algorithm.