Google is now receiving more copyright removal notices than ever in their history – they receive more notices every day than they did in all of 2009 according to their official blog. With so much information at their fingertips, the next natural step in search engine ranking is to begin lowering the ratings of websites with numerous copyright notices.
The effort should actually be very helpful in making search results even more effective for searchers, and won’t affect most websites. We highly doubt that anyone reading this blog has that issue, but it is important to know that a copyright removal notice can be a serious issue and should be addressed immmediately.
There are resources to fight removal notices, mainly sending a “counter-notice” when you receive a notice from Google. See this link for more information.