As you made your way around the Internet today, you may have noticed that many of your favorite sites have been "blacked out" in some form or another. From Mobile Magazine to Wikipedia, these sites are making themselves unavailable or less available to readers.
This is in official protest to SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). They're calling it "dangerous legislation" that will stunt free speech and the free dissemination of information online. However, you've got to wonder if these sites remembered to take the SEO ramifications into consideration.
Google sure did. According to SE Roundtable, the world's largest search engine is very much cognizant of the whole "black out" movement in protest of SOPA/PIPA and it has taken a small step to minimize the SEO impact that this blocking out may have on the rankings of the sites participating in the worldwide protest.
Making an announcement through his own Google page, Google's own Pierre Far said:
"Hello webmasters! We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today's blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only so that the Google results of websites participating in the blackout are less likely to be affected."
Yes, you might still get affected and your search rankings might take a bit of a hit, but Google has made an effort to reduce the crawling rate of its Googlebot. Your site *might* still show up as lacking in its regular content, but that's less likely now. Even so, the bots will go back to work tomorrow at their usual rate and you could, at worse, experience some short to medium term impact on your rankings.
Did you participate in the SOPA blackout protest? Why or why not?
