Google has received more than 50 million requests for ‘pirate’ websites to be removed from its search engine results pages this year.
Staff at the search giant recently vowed to crack down on websites breaching copyright and appear to have done just that after receiving a record-breaking 51,395,353 takedown requests in 2012. Torrentfreak.com reports that nearly all of these requests were granted.
In August, the search engine launched a new SEO algorithm which harmed the rankings of websites that frequently had DMCA requests made against them. Google has also begun publishing a list of websites which are getting these requests made against them.
Both of these methods appear to have helped increase the number of takedown requests the website has received, although searchengineland.com recently reported that black-hat SEOs were making takedown requests against legitimate competitors. Thankfully, these requests seem to rarely lead to removal from Google search engine results pages.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the websites that received the most takedown requests were torrent websites, such as filestube.com, torrenthound.com and torrentz.eu.
Filestube.com has had 2,273,280 URLs removed from Google search results to date making it the most-complained about website. However, the figure represents less than one per cent of the website’s total domain.
