On Sunday, we published a story, based on an article written on SearchEngineLand.com, that looked into Google"s new policy of penalizing websites that have a large number of removal requests for copyright violations. Specifically, there have been questions raised about if Google"s own YouTube website would be exempt from those issues.
At the time, Google sent out a statement saying, "We’re treating YouTube like any other site in search rankings. That said, we don’t expect this change to demote results for popular user-generated content sites." Late on Sunday, a representative from Google got in contact with Neowin and gave us some more specific information.
One of the things that was told to us by Google was that the number of takedown notices it receives from a website is not the only factor that the new Google search algorithm looks into before a search result is pushed down. Indeed, the Google representative told us that there are about 200 different factors that are taken into account, although the Google rep would not go into specifics.
The other major thing about Google"s new search settings is that YouTube will definitely not be alone in avoiding the company"s search crackdown. The Google representative told us that large sites with a lot of user generated content, such as Twitter and Facebook, will also escape being ranked lower under the new search settings.
SearchEngineLand has also posted up their own article after speaking with a Google representative, and added that coypright takedown notices from YouTube"s own system will be combined with takedown notices against YouTube filed from Google"s own system.
Again, we should soon find out if Google"s new search settings will keep content pirated by other sites off of Google"s search results.