The frequency of Fake DMCA Takedown Request attacks has gradually increased during the course of 2024, as word of the Negative SEO vector’s simplicity and effectiveness has spread around the web, among certain “online business” communities and NSEO providers¹.
Almost frighteningly simple in its execution, false DMCA takedowns can have devastating consequences on their victims’ websites and companies.
Breakdown of a Fake DMCA Takedown Attack
Step 1: Copy Your Victim’s Content
Once the attacker has picked a competitor he or she wants to eliminate from the SERPs, all they need to do is copy the victim’s content. This can be done by either copying selected, high-performing “money-term” pages, or by simply copying the entire target website with one of the many tools designed to “back up” and “save” web pages for offline browsing.
With that said, the attack is far more likely to succeed, causing damage, disruption, and financial loss to the victim, if the malicious actor identifies individual, potentially high-performing web pages on the target website, and copies these for use in their negative SEO campaign.
Step 2: Republish the Copied Content
This part is actually more intricate than it might sound, because the copied content needs to be republished in a “plausible” way. If it’s simply reposted on a random website, without the required context, the DMCA takedown attack is less likely to achieve its objective of getting the original content removed from Google’s index.
Some attackers will literally republish the stolen web page[s] on their own site, in direct competition with the victim’s. But while this approach will exponentially increase the chances of success, it can also have massive – and often legal – consequences once the victim manages to get the situation straightened out.
Consequently, most attackers choose to republish the copied content on “straw” domains, registered anonymously and containing false contact information.
To increase the chances of success it’s important to create a plausible site. This can be achieved easily enough nowadays by using AI, thus making the DMCA takedown attack even easier to execute.
Step 3: File a DMCA Takedown Request
I’m not going to go into the finer details of this step, since there are highly defined dos and don’ts involved in filing a fake/false DMCA takedown request successfully. And I’m certainly not going to give those away to potential bad actors in the context of this article.
How to Defend Your Business and Site Against a DMCA Takedown Attack
Not only is there no defense against this type of negative SEO attack, the victim’s website is almost always presumed guilty, resulting in the removal of its legitimate, original content being removed from the Google index while leaving the attacker’s copies untouched.
To say that the removal system is overloaded, due to the sheer volume of DMCA takedown requests which are filed every hour of every day, would be a gross understatement. As a result, most “properly filed and cited” requests are automatically approved without any further checks being carried out prior to the “offending” content’s removal from the Google SERPs.
Worse still, false takedowns filed through Digital Millennium Copyright Act Services Ltd’s. “guilty until proven innocent” system can and will often take prolonged periods of time for victims to rectify, when trying to get their stolen content reinstated into the Google index. These periods can last from a few days to several weeks in some extreme cases.
So what can you do if you’ve fallen victim to a fake DMCA Takedown Attack?
As is the case in most instances of negative SEO attacks, early detection is the key to remedying the situation with minimal damage and loss of revenue.
This requires close monitoring of keywords and visitors, for unexpected shifts in rankings, traffic, and revenue. For instance, if you notice that one of your site’s pages suddenly stops ranking completely, and is replaced by another page from your site, this can be an indicator that something is seriously wrong.
Similarly, if all traffic for a certain landing page suddenly vanishes, there’s a good chance that negative SEO is at work against your website.
The following are ways to ascertain if your content has been removed from the Google index.
- Make an [inurl:] operator search for that page’s URL
- Run an [allintitle:] operator search for that page’s Title
- Search Google for [“quoted string”] of any short piece of text from your page’s content
- Run a search on Lumen Complaints Database, to see if there’s a filed complaint
If you’ve had a false DMCA complaint filed against your website, you’ll need to start the remedial process as quickly as possible. This can be done by following the instructions on the DMCA website.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that – at least at one point – Google’s system “suppressed” the rankings of sites which had multiple DMCA claims filed against them.
It’s unclear whether the search giant still has such measures in place, but it’s another potential layer of complications for victims of negative SEO DMCA takedown attacks.
¹ Try Googling “Negative SEO Service” to see just how many providers openly offer to “Kick your competitors out of the SERPs.” Then come back here and tell me that NSEO isn’t a huge problem for online businesses.