Negative SEO Through DMCA Takedown Notices

enivid

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Aug 18, 2015
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It looks like some of our competitors gone bonkers and is submitting a DMCA notice to Google for each of our high-ranking pages, removing them from SERPs. They use a new entity name as a complainant each time. The complaint texts don't make any sense because none of those pages use any copied content. And they send a lot of such notices. Only today we received 40 such notices from Google that they removed certain URLs from SERPs due to DMCA complaints.

The problem is that Google is acting on such submissions immediately without verifying anything. We file counter notices, but it takes time for Google to process them, meanwhile the traffic is lost.

Does anyone know how to fight back in such cases?
 
Savages.

Sue them if you know who they are.
 
enivid said:
Does anyone know how to fight back in such cases?
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I had something similar happen many years ago. I can only tell you what I did. Which was to try to identify a short list of suspects - and then I returned the shots. Of course, take all the precautions necessary.

Large companies rarely use such tactics. So, I ignored any large, legit looking organization. I identified newer sites and sites that were rising in the search results. I carefully hid my identity and filed takedown notices from different locations on different days. Using a crappy, all-cash cell phone I monitored the search results and the email address I used in the DMCA.

I have found that most web people don't even know about the DMCA. Even if they have heard of it they often don't know how to respond. As I watched pages drop out off Google I started to receive the most vile threats on one of my DMCA emails. Someone was really upset. A few weeks later one of the URLs popped back up on Google. Someone knows enough about the DMCA to file a Counter Notice. So, I send many take down notices against tons of pages on that site. I got lucky because after many threats, included death threats, the person responding sent an email that said something like, "Truce?".

This took a while because each take down notice would take days to get organized. Then I would need to wait a couple weeks to see if the URLs came back into the search results. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The end results was the DMCA attacks stopped. I had a lot of time on my hands back then.
 
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