The Emanuel Update

That’s right, another Google update was released last night, but instead of trying to achieve the goals of Penguin and Panda updates, they are punishing websites with copied content.  SearchEngineLand appropriately gave this update the “Emanuel Update”, after talent agent Ari Emanuel pointed out his dislike for Google being able to filter certain things out like child pornography but not stolen content.

Google has released copyright removal notices on requests from original content owners to remove links from the alleged copyright infringed sites.  While only courts can ultimately determine if someone has actually copyright infringed upon someone, Google can only serve valid copyright notices.  In the past month Google has received and processed over 4.4 million urls.

Since Google cannot actually enforce copyright laws, they are able serve copyright removal notices which then correlates to how well a site ranks in SERP if the case actually goes to court.  The ultimate goal of Google’s newest update is to continue to help users find good legitimate quality content efficiently.  There’s nothing worse than trying to search for something and find the same content on numerous different sites.

Google has also announced that they are unable to punish sites for receiving copyright removal notices, until the case has actually been proven in a court of law.  If a site does get proven guilty in a court of law, then Google will take the necessary steps to remove those links from SERPs.

Some of us may wonder why Google is giving in and punishing copyrighted content, when their general position for years was “the road to all things, what users choose to do with that content is their decision”.  For starters, the search engine aspect of the company is only a smart part.  Google has shifted a large part of its interests into the content distribution scene investing huge sums of money into YouTube and its new music service.