The Pirate update deals with copyright infringement, not treasure hunts. Online piracy has been a problem for about as long as the internet has existed, and Google decided that sites hosting pirated or stolen content shouldn’t get traffic from its search engine. The Pirate update pushes those sites down in the results or removes them altogether. It doesn’t catch every infringing site, and Google keeps adjusting how it penalizes piracy and protects rights holders from illegal distribution.
Launch Date: August 10, 2012
Google had acted against copyright infringement before August 2012, but the Pirate update was its biggest step yet toward finding and punishing sites that published pirated content.
Sites the Pirate update targets
Only one thing triggers the Pirate update: running a website that publishes pirated content. More precisely, it affects sites reported for copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Under the DMCA, rights owners can send takedown notices for stolen or pirated media, and willful piracy can bring criminal charges under U.S. copyright law. Because piracy is so common, Google has stepped up its algorithmic monitoring of these sites. If your site has pirated content and has drawn multiple copyright reports, including from the rights owner, it will drop in the search results or vanish from them.
How the Pirate update works
Piracy of songs, films, video games and other digital media is still a big problem. Google can’t review every page on the web, so the Pirate update goes after sites that violate DMCA copyright rules.
Google processes millions of copyright removal notices every month. Only a court can rule that something is infringement, though, so Google removes a page only when the rights owner sends a valid notice.
When a report against a site is filed and Google finds it valid, the site takes a heavy penalty. Google is enormous and indexes a staggering amount of content, but it still has a reputation to protect. It wants to stay inside the law and give searchers exactly what they asked for at the same time. So when someone searches for a specific movie, Google doesn’t want piracy sites holding the top spots in its SERPs, and the Pirate update is how it keeps them out.
When someone searches a movie title with words like “watch,” “download” or “torrent,” Google filters out free streaming sites and puts legal options such as Netflix, Amazon or Google TV first. A pirate site can still come up if you search for it by name, but it won’t show in organic results for a generic query like “how to watch new movies for free.”
Fixing a site hit by the Pirate update
If your rankings and page visits have dropped sharply, check whether your site has illegal content on it. That could be obvious infringement, like offering a full movie free to visitors, or something easier to miss, like copyrighted music playing behind a video on one of your pages. Using film or music of any kind without the owner’s express permission breaks copyright law. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake: you didn’t know the rules, or you weren’t thinking about them while editing a video together. If you’re knowingly offering pirated media, stop. If you fall into the first group and want to recover from a Pirate penalty (or avoid one), here are two things you can do:
Remove content that violates the DMCA
Take every piece of pirated media off your site. The less illegal content you host, the lower your risk of a Pirate penalty.
Keep user uploads off your main domain
If users can add content to your site, keep user-generated content off your main domain. Then a violation one of your users commits is less likely to hurt your whole site.