If you have a website for your business and you are a copyright holder, it is extremely important to make sure that your content in protected and you do not fall victim to any forms of infringement. There are many companies that have detected a plethora of URLs considered to be “pirate” links that could potentially harm their reputation and steer customers away from their business. While this is an issue no brand wants to deal with, there is a way to halt said URLs and have them removed from Google’s search results.
Google Link Removals have not always been a popular request, but that surely changed in the year 2014. Last year, over 345 millions link removal requests were seen by Google; the search engine received over a million take-down notices to be processed per day. The total number of requests is certainly substantial, but what might be even more significant is the fact that this was an 75% increase from the year 2013.
While the majority of these requests were honored, there are in fact some that Google will not take action against should it find that the associated link is not actually fringing, deemed “pirate” or has already been taken down. So, do not fret if you discover questionable URLs that you feel could steer potential new customers to an incorrect source; submitting link removal requests is simple and clearly a common practice, typically yielding positive results. With the New Year just beginning, it will be interesting to see if these requests tally up above 2014’s total, and time will surely tell.