Google revealed a blog post regarding fighting piracy that connected to a PDF report. The PDF report discusses a ranking change signal. Google’s report reveals that it uses this change signal to rank sites lower. This text reviews the limited known change of google signal for website demotion in rank.

The topic of negative ranking signal isn’t mentioned usually a lot. If you search regarding ranking signals you’ll notice articles regarding ranking signals that facilitate a website rank. However rarely can you discover a piece regarding what negative ranking signals are.

Negative ranking signals have historically been thought of to be things like links to bad sites. Linking to sites in unhealthy neighborhoods have also been thought of to be a negative ranking signal.

As Google started focusing on user expertise, alternative signals like slow page speed became negative ranking signals. Nearly any positive ranking signal can be same to become a negative ranking signal.

Thus, if quick page speed could be a positive ranking signal then a slow page speed could be a negative ranking signal. In different words, a negative ranking signal will be one thing as same as the opposite of a positive ranking signal.

An argument will be created that the shortage of a ranking signal isn’t a negative ranking signal. Many sites rank lower that don’t have any SSL certificate and also are filled with advertising.

And that’s what makes this specific negative ranking signal stand out. It’s not the other of a positive ranking signal. It’s a negative signal all by itself.

It is pretty rare for Google to expressly discuss a real negative ranking signal. That is what makes this document therefore attention-grabbing. This signal has been mentioned within the past inside the context of torrent sites and quickly forgotten.

After all, what do torrent sites must do with net promoting, right? Wrong. there’s plenty here that’s of interest to the SEO community. Google’s document states that DMCA reports filed against an internet site count as a negative ranking signal. It additional states that the more DMCA reports Google receives the lower a website can rank.

This is what Google says:

“Demoting Infringing Websites

In addition to removing pages from search results when notified by the 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.”

This establishes that DMCA reports are a negative ranking signal. It also states that the number of reports creates an increasingly stronger negative signal.”

“…sites for which Google has received a large number of valid removal notices appear much lower in search results. This “demotion signal” amplifies the power of DMCA takedown notices, because each delisted URL can have an effect on the entire domain.”

The concept of a demotion signal has not been discussed a lot in SEO community except in the case of torrents. But a demotion signal can have a wider and bigger impact than just torrent related piracy.

Read Google’s PDF document here

https://www.blog.google/documents/27/How_Google_Fights_Piracy_2018.pdf