Google’s love-hate relationship with content creators has just got better. Early this week, Google announced that it will be altering its search results algorithm to fight piracy and punish copyright violators. This change has been specifically made to limit pirated material on the web.

In the latest update its emphasis is on websites that either indulge in or have a history of copyright infringement. This has also come as a warning to the content creators of various websites that promote piracy.

Starting this week, Google will start issuing notices that will demand the removal of any copyright content on that particular website, according to a blog post by Google’s senior vice president of engineering, Amit Singhal. Google did not elaborate on what it considers to be valid notices.

Since we all know, Google keeps tweaking its ranking formulae. So, how other sites link to your website may not be the most important ranking factor now. The popular belief that sites that get more links are more trustworthy and useful can be done away with.

Hence, even if a particular website gets links from important and useful sources but has copy content issue, may show really low on ranking. This will help users find more relevant and authentic content on the web. A thing to note, this update will not ‘remove’ the page entirely from the search results.

“This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily — whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify,”  said Amit Singhal, SVP of engineering at Google, said in a note on the Google search blog.

Whether this will have an impact on YouTube video ranking is yet to be seen.

We will be watching this development closely. Stay tuned to find out more on this update. And do let us know, how according to you will this update clean the webspace.