Tag: Search Rankings

Google Is Now Censoring The Pirate Bay In Autocomplete

Google freaked out the collective Internet last month when they announced the controversial plan to add DMCA takedown notices into account when providing search results. This would make it so that sites with questionable reputations would be placed below more legitimate sites. It was obviously an attempt to make peace with the copyright industry that has long blamed Google for enabling piracy. It would appear that Google is giving in even more to the content industry with their latest move.

It was revealed today by TorrentFreak that Google is now blocking The Pirate Bay from showing up in Google’s instant or autocomplete searches. When searching for The Pirate Bay, users would normally type it in as one text string like “thepiratebay.” When searching for the site like that, you will now get these results:

What’s funny is that The Pirate Party and the UK proxy for The Pirate Bay both show up. Those searching for The Pirate Bay may instead end up at the Web site for The Pirate Party and learn of their values in regards to file sharing. I’m sure the MPAA and RIAA wouldn’t like the youth of our nation converting to Kopimism.

Like always, performing a direct search still won’t block The Pirate Bay from showing up in search results.

It should be noted that Google is the only search provider that is blocking The Pirate Bay on the autocomplete level. Bing still refers would be pirates to the torrent tracker after just typing in “thepirate.”

What does The Pirate Bay think about this latest attempt to drive traffic away from them? They really don’t care. They told TorrentFreak that they haven’t noticed a decline in referrals from Google. Besides, they previously noted that they consider themselves a search engine that’s competing with Google. More direct searches only serves to give them more advertising dollars.

Even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t care, it’s still worth nothing how Google never enters kill mode with the Web site and other torrent trackers. They may delist them from autocomplete or instant answers, but these can still be found on Google with relative ease. I don’t see things getting too out of hand until Google outright censors The Pirate Bay or others from appearing in search results.

September 10, 2012
Torrent Sites Think Google Is Censoring Them

Google caused a lot of discussion last week when they announced that they were introducing a new ranking signal into their search algorithm. The new signal directly targets sites that receive a lot of DMCA takedown notices and downgrades them in search results. It’s assumed that the move will have an effect on the visibility of sites like The Pirate Bay.

What’s funny is that people can still find content from torrent sites as long as they search for relevant terms. It’s true that typing in “The Avengers download” no longer returns links to The Pirate Bay or other torrent sites. Typing in “The Avengers torrent” brings them all back to the front page.

The Pirate Bay addressed Google lowering their search rankings in a blog post. They say that a “very low amount” of their traffic actually comes from Google and that’s only a good thing. They see themselves as a search engine and Google’s move was a way to get rid of the competition. They expect people to search for content directly on The Pirate Bay when nothing shows up on Google.

They do, however, have one concern about Google’s new policy:

The thing we don’t like with this is that a corrupt industry is deciding what another industry has to do. They’re dictating terms. It’s really ironic: an industry that makes funny movies about dictators, where the dictator is essentially calling the USA a dictatorship, is trying to dictate terms where they have no place to do so….

isoHunt’s Gary Fung takes it a bit further and says that Google’s new ranking signal is an antitrust violation. He points out that YouTube is not on Google’s list of DMCA takedown notices. Google will say that’s because they have their own internal reporting system within YouTube, but isoHunt says it’s all protecting Google’s own interests in search. He reiterates the idea from The Pirate Bay that isoHunt is a search engine that’s competing with Google.

Fung is also concerned over the use of “valid” DMCA takedown notices. He says that Google processes a DMCA takedown notice as valid if it hasn’t been countered. isoHunt receives too many DMCA takedown notices a day for them to counter and so they get counted as signals for Google to downgrade their ranking.

The harm here according to Fung is that a lot of legitimate content on isoHunt gets flagged with DMCA notices by overzealous copyright trolls. The mountains of legitimate content on torrent sites will be removed from Google search results. He equates it to censorship. In response, he says that “we need a protest against Google censorship and antitrust.”

Google has definitely ruffled some feathers with their newest search ranking signal, but it was to be expected sooner or later. The company must now ensure that legitimate content is not downgraded. They must also make search fair for everybody including themselves. Making YouTube and other Google services immune to their own algorithm may raise some antitrust flags in the future.

[h/t: TorrentFreak]

August 17, 2012
comScore Search Rankings: Yahoo Stops the Downward Spiral in May

comScore released its search engine rankings for the United States for May 2012 today and, as far as month-to-month changes go, very little has in fact changed among the market shares claimed by the top search sites. For once, that’s good news for Yahoo.

Google continues to leave a very deep imprint on the cushions of the search engine couch, remaining the number one search brand for the umpteenth month in a row with 66.7% of the market share, which is up .02% from April’s report. Microsoft sites, which include the company’s search engine, Bing, retained the second-highest rank but had a fairly flat month as its market share didn’t budge even a fraction of a percent. Yahoo continued its slow slip in the market but not nearly as bad as previous months while the Ask Network and AOL rounded out the top five.

Microsoft’s sites gained a little bit among explicit core search queries and although the amount was less than one hundred, it was still a 2% increase from last month. Google added over 600 explicit core search queries in May, an increase of 3%. Yahoo, Ask, and AOL, respectively, again rounded out the top five search brands.

In both terms of both market share and explicit core search queries, at least Yahoo was able to stop the skid it’s experienced for much of 2012. From March to April, the company lost 2.4% of its market share to Bing and Google. It’s the middle of the year now and Yahoo has certainly had a tumultuous 2012 thus far, so maybe the second half of the year will see sunnier skies for Yahoo.

comScore notes that last month, 68.9 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.2 percentage points versus April), while 25.6 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

June 13, 2012
Google+ Promotion May Improve Organic Search Ranking

Although previous studies have concluded that social media really does a shoddy job at driving traffic to your websites, TastyPlacement conducted a short experiment to assess a similar concept. More specifically, the group investigated whether social media engagement can help boost a website’s organic search engine ranking.

To see if you can really drive up an organic search engine ranking using some social media sites you may have heard of, TastyPlacement created about as controlled of an experiment as you could do within the vast petri dish that is the internet. As it turns out, collecting Google+ followers seems to be the best way to push a site’s ranking up by as much as 14.63%. Facebook and Twitter showed signs of improving organic search results but not nearly to the degree of promoting via Google+ followers (canvasing for +1s on Google+ resulted in a slightly lesser push in search ranking, but still wasn’t too bad). The only promotional strategy that didn’t seem to improve a site’s ranking was by recruiting Twitter followers.

Have a look at the full infographic detailing the experiment and its results done by TastyPlacement, and feel free to comment with any of your experience or thoughts below.

[Via AllTwitter.]

May 3, 2012
Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Facebook/Twitter Links’ Influence on Search Ranking

We recently looked at how Google and Bing use links on Twitter and Facebook for organic ranking, following an informative piece from Danny Sullivan on the matter. Google’s Matt Cutts has now addressed the subject a bit more in a new video uploaded to Googles’ Webmaster Help Channel.

Do you want social media to influence search rankings? Comment here.

"We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook," says Cutts. "I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal."

Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.

"The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on Realtime Search…have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal," explains Cutts. "So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up, and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings."

To reiterate, you’ll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search, but Google is "looking at it more broadly within web search as well," according to Cutts.

"Now, there’s a few things to remember," Cutts warns. "Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings."

This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot when the user isn’t sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search rankings.

"This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being," says Cutts. "The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that."

Would you like to see Facebook/Twitter links carry more weight in organic search? Share your thoughts here.

Related: Google & Bing Are Looking at Links on Twitter & Facebook for Organic Ranking

December 21, 2010