How YouTube Will Escape Google’s New Pirate Penalty
Found on Search Engine Land on Sunday, 12 August 2012
Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn’t need to worry: Google’s own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty.
Since Google doesn’t seem to disclose the number of YouTube takedown requests it has acted upon (I have asked for a figure), there’s no way to assess YouTube against the other sites on the strikeout list above.
There’s no way to treat YouTube — or Blogger — like any other site in the search rankings, when those sites have special takedown forms that don’t allow their alleged infringing activity to measured up against other sites.
As expected. Google of course won't do anything which harms the ranking of sites owned by them. Claiming that Youtube is different is in no way a valid excuse; if that's the case, just remove Youtube completely and let users search directly on the video site. Right now Google is just dancing around because with the undoubtly large amount of takedown requests, Youtube (and probably Blogger too) would be on top of the list, facing a removal from the search results (yes, pages are "only" ranked down, but people rarely go past page 4 or 5, so it's effectively a removal).