Google Can't Stop Fake DMCA Attacks - And SEOs Are Getting Wiped Out

Edward: Fraudulent DMCA takedowns are wreaking havoc in Google Search I've covered this on the podcast before, but Search Engine Roundtable wrote a great article about it. And if you're watching this, maybe you found this on Google or this was recommended to you on YouTube because this is happening to you, because you have gotten a fraudulent DMCA takedown The good news is you can and should file a counter notice immediately. The bad news is your content could be out for days, weeks, or even months.

And if you're watching because you're not familiar with what's going on, this is the situation. So this is by Barry Schwartz in Search Engine Roundtable. He writes, " Google has always allowed you to request that content be removed from Google Search via the legal DMCA request form. But in the past year or so, this legal route has become a negative SEO nightmare.

Real content owned by the original publisher and website has been removed from Google Search due to fraudulent DMCA requests that Google is complying with even though the requests are not legit. The Press-Gazette posted about the second time it had content removed from Google over these fraudulent DMCA takedowns. Even Search Engine Land had content removed last March over this fraud, and Moz had this happen in 2022. I see complaints about this daily, and it seems to be a growing issue.

To be fair, Google did sue over companies weaponizing the DMCA request route in 2023, but honestly, since then, the situation has only become more of an issue. There are even companies blackmailing sites with fake DMCA notices." So yeah, back in 2023, Google filed a lawsuit against two men who allegedly used Google's DMCA process aimed at removing hundreds of thousands of their competitors' websites' URLs from Google Search results They targeted Up to 620,000 URLs And the judgment in September 2024 was that Google won oh my God, this is crazy.

The court permanently banned them from submitting false DMCA copyright takedown request to Google, creating or trying to create any Google accounts, using Google products or services to promote their sites or products, using Google product services to harm third parties, helping anyone else do these things, and Google didn't even seek monetary damages Then this was reported by The Next Web. Spammers are using AI to create fake lawyer profiles that are going around sending fake DMCA requests demanding a link to their site for the use of content or images It'll say something like, " Our client is happy for their image to be used and shared across the internet.

However, proper image credit is due for the past or ongoing usage." And so they're trying to get a backlink like that. That's crazy So this is back to All these fraudulent DMCA takedowns Pedro Dias, who I shared on the show a couple episodes ago, he said, "Google has a serious problem and no one is working to fix it or willing to. Spurious copyright claim sees second Press Gazette story removed from Google Search.

The claim filed under US law seeks to hide Press Gazette reporting about ClickOut Media." This is literally what it says on the Press Gazette website. " A Press Gazette article exposing the dubious parasite SEO tactics of online marketing company Click Out Media has been removed from Google search results after a spurious anonymous legal challenge. A mysterious entity called DRF Corp wrote to Google stating Press Gazette had willfully violated copyright law by copying our entire content word for word, including all images, which are solely owned by our company, even though the content allegedly copied was on an unrelated subject."

so if you get one of these DMCA request notifications, it'll be in your inbox. It'll say something like, "Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search. Google has been notified according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that some of the material found on your site allegedly infringes upon the copyrights of others." The article says sometimes your content can be out of Google not just for hours, but days or weeks, if not months And there's all these stories shared of people this has happened to In the comments for the Search Engine Roundtable post, somebody named Tom Coe wrote, " This happened to us.

Someone lock, stock, and barrel copied our page, which was ranking high on page one onto Tumblr, then made a DMCA report even though that fake page clearly contained our name and branding. It took two weeks before our page was back, but the damage was done. Not back on page one, and the culprit could not be identified. He did the same to some of our competitors as well, so page one looked pockmarked with several 'In response to the complaint, we received' gravestones.

Google needs to be more sophisticated than that." This is again from Pedro Dias. He wrote I think that in order to force Google to solve this, the whole working methodology needs to be exposed. 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. every URL taken down will take your competitors at least two weeks of waiting to get them back, and if you compound multiple DMCAs on the same URL, the waiting time can increase to at least a couple of months. Also, if your competitors are relying solely on Google Search Console warnings and do not have active mechanisms to track all of it, compounding DMCA takedowns on the same URL across multiple URLs means they will miss eighty percent of the DMCAs against them.

Google Search Console misses a lot of these, which will compound negatively against the whole domain. So it turns out the best strategy to win in Google search in twenty twenty-six is to DMCA the crap out of your competitors Charles Floate wrote a really long post about this. " An engineer told me Google knows about this but said they can't stop it." I've talked about this on the podcast before, and Charles has been covering this for a long time.

He's also come on the show to talk about it. Charles Floate, friend of the podcast, has been on many times But he said, "If you want to remove a competitor from Google, you don't need bad links or backdoor access to their site. You don't even need much time or a budget to back it up. You just need a fake legal notice, and Google will do the dirty work for you."

He said, "I ran into Gary Ilyes, one of the lead search engineers at Google, and I asked him one question " You know me. You know I wouldn't tell you this if it wasn't a real issue, but DMCA negative SEO?" Gary looked back at me, sighed, and said, " We know. There's nothing we can do about it.

It's a compliance issue." And whilst I tend to want to believe him, there are definitely complaint solutions out there. They are just quite costly. But the real answer is that Google has zero commercial incentive to fix this.

The businesses being damaged are mostly affiliates, mid-tier publishers, and small to mid commercial operators. The economic value Google extracts from these businesses is dwarfed by the cost of building a manual review pipeline that would catch fake notices This is what Charles Floate predicts will happen. The volume will continue to compound. A class action will get filed with operators of the size and sophistication that are now being affected, this becomes inevitable.

The damages are quantifiable, the negligence is well-documented, and Google's stated position that they can't act will be tested in court, and the discovery process will be brutal. The EU got concessions out of Google on site reputation abuse without needing litigation. The US won't be as polite, especially if the Democrats regain power Then regulatory intervention will follow Until then, the best operators are stuck in a de-indexation arms race against bad actors who face essentially zero consequences So that's what's going on The real scary thing is this will happen going into launches.

So someone has been planning a big launch, and then the DMCA happens right as the launch is occurring, which is right when the launch is occurring, that's when you make the most money. This is such a bad thing that's going on. If this has happened to you, again, file a counter-notice. Hopefully, your content won't be out for very long.

Sometimes it comes back really fast And, you know, I, I'm, I'm an optimistic person. I am an optimistic person. That's why I do everything that I do, and I think that in the next couple of years, this will be fixed, maybe sooner, because it is a big issue, and Google knows it's a big issue. So that's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show.

If you wanna learn my method of doing search engine optimization, where you're specifically targeting people who want what your brand sells, it is SEO designed to get customers, users, warm leads calling you up. I spent a year making this. I update it constantly. It is the best SEO course on the market.

You will love it. It is at compactkeywords.com if you want to check it out This is episode 1,093 of The Edward Show. This is my daily search engine optimization podcast.

1,093 days in a row doing this show. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow.