2014/10/26

Google announced that the Pirate Update 2 was rolled out this week. After many criticisms that Google is not doing enough against Piracy it updated its filter to help stem piracy. It works similar like Panda or Penguin. Based on a huge set of queries and the data Google had from the first Pirate update, which was released about 2 years ago Google is looking for copyright infringements. Any site where Google finds a violation or was filed through Google’s DMCA system will receive a huge drop in rankings or will be even removed from search engine result pages (see screenshot).

In our data that I analyzed I found that almost all sites where I think they had a drop because of the Pirate Update the drop was enormous. Some sites received a loss in SEO Visibility to 98%. I don’t know how many false positives are amongst these pages, so the loser list is just an observation of sites that lost.

Normally I conduct a longer analysis and explain the patterns why sites lost or won, this time I make an exception. There is not so much to say about the losers. Amongst the loser sites are sites that had links and/or content to movie, TV and music content. Sites like movie4k.to which lost 98% of SEO Visibility have typical loser keywords like “download free movies”, “watch [movie name] online free”, “online free movies”, “movies download”, “watch [movie name]”, “where can I watch [movie name] online” etc.

The top 30 loser list

It’s based on our SEO Visibility and sorted by biggest net loss. You can click each loser and continue the analysis in our Searchmetrics Suite.

Here you see the SEO Visibility chart for 3 loser domains in the Google Pirate Update. The pattern is simple, all have a huge drop and share similar keywords or keywords with the same intention.