The music industry has always been keen for search engines (and yes, that includes Bing and others, but really we’re talking about Google here) to do more to downrank piracy sites. Some good news: it seems that the measures they have taken are working. TorrentFreak and Muso teamed up to analyse traffic to piracy sites in 2020, and specifically traffic from search engines.
The key finding: “From December 2019 to November 2020, search traffic to pirate sites dropped by roughly a third.” This included a ‘freefall’ in early May, which as the piece pointed out, coincided with a major algorithm update by Google. “While Google hasn’t officially confirmed that algorithm updates targeted pirate sites, the data suggest that there’s a clear link…”
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