846 Million URLs removed by Google for Copyright Infringement

Google have just released a new transparency report which contains details of the volume of copyright complaints they receive. It appears that year by year, the number of requests has increased by a staggering amount.

The figures show that so far in 2016 (September) over 342,000 sites have been affected by copyright complaints and over 846 million URLs have been removed by successful requests.

Websites that contain copyrighted material can be removed completely from the search results if the site content is in breach of intellectual property laws.

Google started accepting copyright requests from users in 2011 and since then 1.78 billion URLs have been removed. The number of copyright infringement requests has doubled year on year since 2013.

If you are a content creator and someone has stolen your content, in some cases Google won’t be able to recognise this initially. Though the search engine can detect instances of issues such as duplicate content it can’t always detect copyright infringement algorithmically, hence the need for content removal requests.

If your intellectual property has been published by a site without your permission and is appearing in the index, you can submit a copyright request to Google’s legal team.

Google will review your request and make a decision as to whether to remove the content based on the information provided.

For the figures in full, take a look at the Google transparency report