Fake DMCA takedowns can remove your pages from Google – and you might never be told

In March this year, Search Engine Land published an investigation into some dodgy SEO practices. The day after it went live, someone filed a copyright complaint with Google claiming the article had stolen their content “word for word, including all images.”

The article had no images. Not one.

Google removed the page from search results anyway. It took four days and a public outcry from the SEO industry to get it reinstated – and that’s a major publication with lawyers, contacts at Google, and an audience willing to make noise on its behalf.

If it happened to your business website, how long do you think it would take you to even notice?

What is a DMCA takedown?

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is a piece of US law from 1998 that lets copyright holders ask platforms like Google to remove content that’s been stolen from them. If someone nicks your blog post and republishes it on their site, you can file a DMCA notice and Google will remove the stolen copy from its search results.

Which is a good thing. Content theft is real, and the system exists for sensible reasons.

The problem is what happens when people file complaints about content they don’t own, purely because they don’t like it.

How fake DMCA takedowns remove legitimate pages from Google

Google’s process removes first and asks questions later. When a complaint comes in, the page comes out of search results based on the notice alone – before anyone checks whether the claim is true. Google doesn’t verify the identity of the person filing, so complaints regularly arrive under made-up names.

And people have noticed. Competitors are now filing fake copyright claims specifically to knock rival pages out of Google. Press Gazette has had legitimate journalism removed twice this year. The first time, in March, the article was restored within a day – because they’re a news outlet that could kick up a public stink about it. The second, in late June, was still missing from Google weeks later. Same publication, same attacker’s playbook, very different outcome once nobody was watching.

Moz was hit back in 2022, there are firms charging hundreds or thousands of pounds per takedown as a paid service, and some have moved into straight-up blackmail – pay us or we’ll file complaints against your site. Google did sue some of these operations in 2023. The complaints kept growing anyway.

Why Google Search Console won’t always warn you

You’d hope that if Google removed one of your pages, it would tell you. Sometimes it does – a message appears in Search Console. But it’s unreliable, and notices can arrive one at a time while multiple complaints stack up against you. Google’s own Transparency Report admits it can’t always verify requests or notify site owners before removing content, and some SEOs tracking these attacks reckon Search Console misses around 80% of the notices filed against a site.

So the first sign might simply be a page that stops getting traffic. Which, let’s be honest, most business owners would blame on an algorithm update, their SEO consultant, or their own content. You could spend weeks fiddling with a page that was never the problem (don’t worry, everyone would).

If your rankings drop suddenly, this now belongs on the list of things to rule out – alongside the more common explanations I’ve covered in Why has my SEO ranking tool suddenly stopped working? and Google Search Console impressions dropped overnight?.

How to check if your pages have been hit by a fake DMCA takedown

The quickest first check costs nothing and needs no tools. Search Google for the title of the missing page. If it’s been removed by a complaint, Google puts a notice at the bottom of the results page saying it has removed results in response to a DMCA complaint, with a link to the details.

For a fuller picture, there’s a public database called Lumen that records takedown notices sent to Google. Search for your domain and you’ll see every complaint filed against it – who filed it (or what name they hid behind), when, and which of your pages it targeted.

While you’re at it, keep evidence that you published your content first. Wayback Machine captures, publication dates, first-crawl dates in Search Console – anything that proves the work is yours. You’ll want it if you ever have to fight a claim.

How to get your pages back after a false copyright claim

You file a counter notice through Google’s form, stating that the removal was a mistake and attaching your proof of ownership. If the complainant doesn’t respond by suing you in an actual court – which requires a real name and a real legal case, at which point most fake claimants evaporate – your page is reinstated within 10 to 14 business days.

Unbelievably, the person filing the original complaint only has to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re authorised to act for the copyright owner. The claim of theft itself? Just a “good faith belief.” But your counter notice – the one defending content you wrote – has to be sworn under penalty of perjury in full. The victim is held to a higher legal standard than the attacker.

There are legal remedies against fraudulent filers, but you’d have to take them to court to use them, and good luck serving papers on a fake name.

Should B2B businesses worry about fake DMCA takedowns?

Probably not lose-sleep worry, no. The worst of this is happening in brutally competitive niches – gambling, affiliate sites, anywhere rankings convert directly into large sums of money. A B2B service business in a sensible industry is a less likely target.

But less likely isn’t never, and the tactic is getting cheaper and more automated. The reason I’m writing about it is simpler: if one of your pages disappears from Google, I want you to know this is a thing that exists. Not so you panic, but so you check for a takedown before you spend three weeks rewriting a perfectly good page or firing a perfectly good SEO.

None of this is new, by the way. Fake takedowns have been used against competitors since at least 2018. What’s changed is the scale – and how little Google seems able, or willing, to do about it.

---