Google has added some new online piracy tools and features, but one in particular has the possibility to affect webmasters, particularly those who are on the receiving end of DMCAs filed with Google.

In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA notices. We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites. This update will roll out globally starting next week.

This means if your site has received multiple DMCAs, you can expect that the site will begin ranking lower as it is used as a search signal.  Google does alert webmasters to DMCAs in Google Webmaster Tools if the site has an account.

In Google’s “How Google Fights Piracy” they go into the ranking issue further.

In addition to removing pages from search results when notified by copyright owners, Google also factors in the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site as one signal among the hundreds that we take into account when ranking search results. Consequently, sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. This ranking change helps users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.

While we use the number of valid copyright removal notices as a signal for ranking purposes, we do not remove pages from results unless we receive a specific removal request for the page. Even for the websites that have received the highest numbers of notices, the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site. It would be inappropriate to remove entire sites under
these circumstances.

Google currently processes millions of copyright removal requests each week, and generally process them within 6 hours, meaning it is an effective tool to see copyrighted content removed from the search results.  In 2013 they received over 224 million DMCA requests for Google search results – but 2 million of them were either rejected or reinstated after review.

It also raises the question about whether this could increase the number of troll DMCAs filed with Google.  After all, Google simply removes the page from the search results for the majority of DMCA filings it receives.    If the DMCA is false, then the true content owner must file a counter DMCA back to prove the content is theirs.  This has been a problem in the past, often related to censorship attempts or reputation management, but the problem could escalate with this new change, if some webmasters see it as an easy way to influence rankings of their competitors.

That said, overall, if you are a webmaster producing great quality content and do not infringe on any content, this should be great, especially if you have competitors who are scraping or lifting content without permission, and provided someone is filing DMCAs on that infringed content.