50 Million Pages Removed From Google This Year Due To DMCA Piracy Reports

We know that the number of DMCA requests have risen since Google introduced its Pirate Update, a penalty against sites that have an unusual number of legitimate DMCA requests filed against them. But what’s the count? TorrentFreak.com did the math and counted that Google took down over 50 million search results or URLs in 2012 alone. To be exact, Google removed 51,395,353 […]

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Dmca GoogleWe know that the number of DMCA requests have risen since Google introduced its Pirate Update, a penalty against sites that have an unusual number of legitimate DMCA requests filed against them. But what’s the count? TorrentFreak.com did the math and counted that Google took down over 50 million search results or URLs in 2012 alone.

To be exact, Google removed 51,395,353 links from their search engine in 2012, and 7,816,766 of those were issued by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), which led the number of requests and taken downs.

Here is the chart showing the sharp increase in takedown requests per week, with the numbers climbing dramatically after the Pirate Update was introduced in early August:

Google Dmca

I’d say expect 2013 to keep climbing.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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