If you work within the creative industry then you will be well aware of the copyright headaches, with images, videos and content all having to be protected. With big brands ploughing huge sums into protecting themselves it seems Warner Bros has taken a rather different approach, today filing a copyright complaint against their very own website.
Where the majority of business SEO efforts lay with ranking for various search terms Warner Bros are singing to a rather different hymn sheet, asking Google to remove its own website for certain search results. Claiming that they are violating copyright laws the film studio asked the search engine to remove links to credible streaming websites including Amazon and Sky Cinema. While the majority of us would kill for a backlink from such high profile websites it seems such big brands are going to great lengths to fight against pirated content online, with Google’s job to direct users to relevant content, based solely on the words they search.
Also requesting that Google remove links to the official website for films like the Matrix and Batman: The Dark Knight this subject must be high up in the studio’s digital marketing priorities. Requesting the removal of 13million links Warner had obviously got something wrong here, with Google’s transparency ultimately saving their SEO bacon.
However, as TorrentFreak’s editor-in-chief, Ernesto Van der Sar, pointed out Warner is “inadvertently trying to make it harder for the public to find links to legitimate content,” which runs separate to its intentions.
“Unfortunately these kind of errors are very common,” said Mr Van der Sar.
“Piracy monitoring firms often use automated systems to find and report copyright infringing websites. I’m fairly certain that this happened here as well, considering the obvious mistakes that were made.
“A good approach would be to white-list non-infringing sources such as warnerbros.com and amazon.com – but apparently that didn’t happen.”
“Luckily for the Hollywood studio, Google is there to save the day. The search engine spotted its mistakes and decided to take no action for the Amazon, Sky and IMDb links,” he finished.
Let us know what yo think about Warner Bros digital marketing efforts by leaving your comments below.
Leave a Reply