Fraudulent DMCA takedowns in Google search - A negative SEO nightmare

As Google allowed anyone to request content removal from SERPs, fraudulent DMCA requests are piling up requesting the removal of original content owned by the original publisher and website. And guess what? Google is removing webpages without thinking twice.

The victims are not random bloggers but even the credible websites like Press Gazette, Search Engine Land, and Moz faced this issue. Some of these DMCA takedown requests are clearly fake without even looking at the details.


Pedro Dias pointed out the issue -


He also shared about it in his LinkedIn post -

Right now, you can take ANY of your competitors down just by targeting them with fake DMCA takedowns. Google doesn't check for ID or credible information on the submitter and the process just goes on unchecked.

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Every URL taken down, will take your competitors at least 2 weeks of waiting to get them back. And, if you compound multiple DMCAs on the same URLs, the waiting time can increase to at least a couple of months.

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Charles Floate said "An Engineer Told Me Google KNOWS About This... But Said They Can't Stop It."

It is surprising to see how Google couldn't handle such a huge issue even after it was reported by many SEOs.

Ironic.

To rank a website, they demand verification/confirmations in form of backlinks and multitude of other signals.

But when it comes to taking it down, they don't verify anything.

seo mastermind said:

If that's happening to established sites too, it sounds like the review process could use some improvement.

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Google already knows the issue. All top SEOs whom Google engineers follow on X are talking about it. They probably can't fix it. I guess they follow their traditional strategy of silencing instead of solving. They skip take downs of high authority sites so that the brands and influencers won't talk about the problem on social media.

the part that makes this so nasty is it's automated on both ends — google's trusted-copyright program processes takedowns in bulk, so a plausible-looking complaint gets actioned before a human really looks at it. the attacker isn't beating a review, at that volume there basically isn't one.

if anyone reading gets hit, the counter-notification works more often than people expect, and two moves matter fast. one, pull the complaint off the lumen database — google forwards takedowns there, so you can see exactly what was filed and by whom, and half of them are garbage that names URLs the "owner" clearly doesn't hold. two, file the counter-notice with real proof of original authorship: first-publish date, an archive.org snapshot from before their supposed "original," your search console history. once a valid counter-notice is in, the page gets reinstated in about 10-14 business days unless they actually sue — and these people almost never sue, because the whole point was a free, no-accountability hit.

the thing worth setting up BEFORE it ever happens is making your authorship provable — timestamps, archived copies, a clear publish trail. the victims who get stuck aren't the ones who weren't first, they're the ones who can't quickly prove they were.

I'm adding more information for site owners to deal with this situation.

Under the DMCA, someone claiming to hold a copyright can send Google a notice requesting removal of a webpage from search results. The webpage can be delisted if Google acts on the notice. The burden of disputing it then falls on the site owner. The law doesn’t require Google to decide whether the copyright claim itself is valid, so a disputed page can stay out of search results even after the owner objects.

In its Transparency Report, Google says that people who submit DMCA requests may provide inaccurate information, that it cannot always verify the accuracy of a request and notify a site owner before content is removed.

It's a good practice to immediately file a counter-notice as the process may take several days to reinstate the page in search results. If you receive a DMCA takedown notice, you should also verify complete list of URLs taken down and file individual counter-notices for each URL as Google cannot pre-screen or batch-review claims.

If you notice a webpage suddenly losing all the traffic, then check for any notifications. You can also manually search for the keyword and check below the SERPs to see if Google added any takedown message indicating that some pages were removed due to DMCA claims. Although this issue is not widespread yet, many people started exploiting it to get rid of their competitors (particularly in ecom). We may also face it from our competitors unless Google makes DMCA takedown process strict.

I got one of those aswell on my main website. Had to contact google in order to explain the situation and my website was not penalized.