Copyright violating file-sharing sites 'unfazed' with Google's 'harmless' downgrading exercise

London - Two file-sharing services have suggested that Google's decision to downgrade the ranking of websites that have received a high number of valid copyright removal notices in search results would not harm them.

The Pirate Bay and Isohunt said the move would only encourage users to search for material directly through their pages.

According to the BBC, the two services added that Google was not their main source of traffic.

"That Google is putting our links lower is in a way a good thing for us. We'll get more direct traffic when people don't get the expected search result when using Google," said The Pirate Bay in a blog post.

"The thing we don't like with this is... they're dictating terms," it added.

Gary Fung, owner of BitTorrent Isohunt, pointed out that only 21 percent of its traffic came from Google.

"We have plenty of torrent links to non-copyright infringing content, and we'll be adding 1.4 million more from the Internet Archive soon," he added.

Announcing the new policy on its blog, Google recently said that sites with "high numbers" of "valid" removal notices would be affected as the search company tries instead to "help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.

Google said that it has received over 4.3 million copyright removal requests in the past month, about 97 percent of which are valid.

Many of the domains that are targets of the most requests are file-sharing and torrent sites.

Those sites would presumably appear lower in Google search rankings and therefore be harder to find.