Digital Piracy And Search Engines

Potential consumers often find the products they are looking for through search engines and of course, most business owners have heard of search engine optimization. There’s often huge emphasis on how to rank a business’s site higher on top keywords, but businesses often overlook how piracy listings in the search engines can counter act all the work a site owner has done to make the site beautiful and search engine friendly.

Typically a consumer who searches for a brand or a title directly is usually given legitimate sources or occasionally a piracy site may get into that mix. However, if you just add a keyword like “download” or “mp3” for musicians or “pdf” for authors it opens up a whole slew of piracy sites that a consumer is exposed to. In many cases, consumers innocently add these keywords because they are looking for the pdf version of a book they want and not the hard copy. In other cases, search engines suggest these keywords as alternates and in some extreme cases you have a non-consumer on your hand who is looking for their quick fix on something free.

In all 3 of these cases, it’s extremely important to mitigate the damages from search engines listing these piracy sites. Simple search engine optimization techniques can help by adding relevant keywords like download or PDF into the site owner’s sites. However, it’s also important to de-list the piracy urls that are causing competition by sending DMCA notices to the major search engines like Google and Yahoo/Bing.

You can see from the charts below how certain keywords are trending up in Google search as consumers become more and more familiar with the terms. In some cases “piracy” keywords are trending up while “legitimate” keywords are trending down.

Do a quick search on your titles in the search engines and add some of these common terms. See what comes up and evaluate if you think you are losing potential buyers from what they find.

DMCA Force submits all infringing URLS that are indexed by Google and Yahoo/Bing for search engine de-listing. We also take a manual approach and review all of our clients listings as necessary. There’s an added benefit to this as well and that comes with Google’s announcement last year that they are going to penalize sites they received DMCA Notices for through ranking them lower.