Why are SOPA and PIPA so Bad?

SearchEngineLand.com along with other resources have been helping webmasters and SEO firms prepare for today’s protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. Wikipedia and Reddit are some of the biggest names going black for the day.

WordPress and Google’s hompages have been altered to show their solidarity.

Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst announced that they would be slowing down GoogleBot’s crawl activity to reduce the effects of the blackout on a sites SEO standings.

Pierre Far posted the following on his Google+:

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.

Floating around Twitter, Facebook and accessible from Google’s homepage is a petition to tell congress that we don’t want this kind of censorship on the web. I’ve seen online people saying “Well shouldn’t Wikipedia and Google want to stop piracy?” All of these sites and those supporting this want to stop piracy, but the legislation needs to be rewritten, as it stands it could cripple the internet with far too much censorship. This post from Stumble Upon’s blog gives a good overview of why so many websites are against SOPA and PIPA.

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