Google has said that it can’t police the web for sites that contain unlawful content, which is understandable. However, it will remove pages from its index if they are reported, and it agrees there’s an issue. This will not automatically lead to sites being ‘banned’, but – for example – if a site gets a lot of reports for breaking copyright law, or for publishing unnecessarily personal information, it will be automatically minimised in the search results.
The key though is that the search engine relies heavily on reports being submitted. So if you come across a page with something harmful to your business, such as copied content or illegal use of your trademarks, you really must report it. There’s a form to do so here.
There’s a recent blog post on the subject from Google here.
You might be surprised at the number of websites composed of millions of pages of copied content, quite possibly including your own. It’s impossible to stop them, but we can at least make it difficult for people to find them.