There’s a lot of noise right now about people weaponizing DMCA takedowns against competitors. Barry Schwartz covered it at Search Engine Roundtable in early July, and the examples are piling up: Press Gazette has had stories pulled from Google twice, Search Engine Land lost an article in March, and the complaints show up daily on LinkedIn and X.
The mechanics are ugly. Google lets anyone request that content be removed from Search through its DMCA form, and by most accounts it does not verify the identity or credibility of the person filing. So you can file a copyright claim against a competitor’s page, and Google will often remove it from search results first and ask questions later.
Pedro Dias laid out the abuse pattern plainly: a removed URL can take two weeks or more to come back, filing repeated notices on the same URL can stretch that to months, and Search Console misses a large share of the notices, so a site relying only on GSC alerts never even sees most of what’s been filed against it.
Google did sue two operators over fraudulent takedowns back in 2023, but the problem has clearly grown since.
It’s a real problem and worth taking seriously. But I want to add one thing to the conversation that’s getting lost in the alarm: this is not new. People have been doing this for years. I know, because it happened to me in 2022.
What Happened to Me
Back in 2022, when I still indexed The SEO Pub notes in search engines, I shaed a note about the SEO strategy a company called Uproad was using. It was a toll-payment app, and I thought their SEO was genuinely clever. The note was a compliment. It broke down what they were doing and why it worked.
The head of their SEO did not take it as a compliment. He emailed me and asked me to take the note down. His argument was that I was giving away their SEO strategy to Google, and that this could somehow bring a penalty down on them.
That was a silly thought. There was nothing secret about what they were doing. Any SEO who spent five minutes on their website could see the whole strategy laid out. It broke no Google policy. There was no mechanism by which a third party writing an article about your public website triggers a penalty.
I explained this and declined to take it down.
So he filed a DMCA takedown notice against the page, claiming I was using their content without permission.
I was not.
The note was my own writing and analysis, with a few screenshots to illustrate the points, which is ordinary commentary. The claim was baseless. It did not matter. Google removed the page from search results immediately.
Here is the part I want you to hold onto: I appealed, and the decision was reversed in two to three days.
Appealing Is Easier Than the Panic Suggests
The counter-notice process is not complicated, and it is the whole reason the current wave, while genuinely annoying, is survivable. If a fraudulent notice hits one of your pages, you file a counter notification, and a bogus claim does not hold up.
I’ll be honest about the timeline, because it has changed. Mine came back in a couple of days in 2022. Current reports suggest restoration can take longer now, sometimes a couple of weeks, longer if someone is compounding notices on the same URL.
So I am not going to promise you a 48-hour turnaround. What I will tell you is that the process works, that a fraudulent claim gets reversed on the merits, and that the single biggest thing in your control is how fast you file. The sooner you counter, the sooner the clock starts. Delay is the only thing that turns a nuisance into a real loss.
What to Do If It Happens to You
Here are the actual mechanics, so you are not figuring this out under pressure.
Watch for the notice, and do not rely solely on Search Console. Google notifies the affected site, but as Pedro Dias pointed out, GSC misses a lot of these. If you see a page suddenly drop out of the index with no ranking explanation, a DMCA removal is now a real candidate, so check for it directly rather than assuming an algorithm update.
Check the Lumen database. Google forwards the DMCA notices it acts on to lumendatabase.org, where they are published. You can look up notices filed against your URLs there and see exactly what was claimed and by whom, which is useful both for your counter-notice and for understanding who is coming after you.
File the counter notification. Google provides a counter-notice form for content removed from Search. You identify the removed URL, state under penalty of perjury that the material was removed by mistake or misidentification, provide your contact information, and consent to the relevant legal jurisdiction. That penalty-of-perjury language cuts both ways, and it is why a fraudster’s claim tends to collapse the moment a real person pushes back on the record: they filed a false statement, and you did not.
Act immediately, and keep records. File the counter-notice the day you find out, not the week you get around to it. Save the notice, the Lumen entry, and your counter-notification. If the same party keeps filing, that documented pattern is exactly what turns their harassment into their problem rather than yours.
Do not let it scare you off publishing. That is often the actual goal of these notices, to make you quieter. The correct response to a baseless claim is to answer it and keep going.
The Note That Started It, and the Strategy Worth Stealing
This whole current mess reminded me of that old Uproad note, so I went back and reread it. Uproad no longer exists as a company, and I no longer index my notes I share here, but the note is still up. The funny part, in hindsight, is that the strategy the guy was so determined to hide was genuinely worth writing about. So let me lay it out again, because the idea is still a good one, and the company being gone means there’s nothing left to protect.
Uproad had a classic problem. It was an app that let you pay tolls from your phone, and almost nobody was searching for it. The direct queries were tiny. “Toll road app” pulled around 140 searches a month, “best toll road app” around 70, “app for paying tolls” around 10. You cannot build a business on that.
The market for the thing they sold barely existed in search.
So instead of fighting over that scrap of volume, they used SEO to create a market.
The insight was to stop targeting people searching for what the app is, and start targeting people searching for the problem the app solves. People clearly were not searching for a toll app, but they absolutely searched for specific tolls: how much a particular bridge or express lane costs, how to pay a specific toll, how to pay a toll online after the fact.
They built that out programmatically. A page for each individual toll point in their footprint, organized into a hub page listing every toll by state, linked from the site footer. Each toll page had a clear title, an embedded map, the cost and payment information a searcher actually wanted, and a call to action to grab the app off to the side. The internal linking at the bottom of each page tied the whole thing into a tight, siloed structure. Someone searching “how much is the Antioch Bridge toll” landed on a genuinely useful page, got their answer, and got introduced to an app they never knew existed.
That is the move: a huge number of low-volume, high-relevance queries across an entire footprint, adding up to real traffic and putting the product in front of exactly the people who would want it. They were not capturing existing demand. They were manufacturing it, one toll at a time.
How Other Businesses Could Use the Same Play
The pattern generalizes to any business where few people search for your product but many people search for the problem it solves. Target the named things and the questions around them, build a page for each, and put your product on those pages. Three examples in different industries:
A parking reservation app. Almost nobody searches “parking app,” but enormous numbers of people search for parking at specific places: a stadium, an airport, a downtown garage, a hospital. Build a page per venue targeting the venue name plus the real questions (“how much is parking at,” “where to park near,” “can you reserve parking at”), answer them well, and offer the reservation on the page. Same structure as Uproad, different named entities.
A money transfer service. The category term is competitive and the product term is thin, but people constantly search things like “how to send money to the Philippines,” “Brazilian real to US dollar,” or “cheapest way to send money to India.” Build a page per currency corridor or country, answer the exchange-rate and how-to questions, and put the transfer flow right there. You are catching people at the moment they have the problem, not hoping they know your brand.
A B2B compliance or payroll software company. This is not just a consumer-app trick. Businesses search “how to register for payroll tax in Ohio,” “New York meal break law,” or “how to get a contractor license in Arizona.” Build a page per state per topic, give an accurate, genuinely useful answer, and position the software as the thing that handles it going forward. The same low-volume-times-many-pages math works, and it reaches buyers while they are actively researching the pain your product removes.
The common thread is simple. Do not limit yourself to the handful of people already looking for your exact product. Find the much larger group searching around the problem, meet them on a page built for their specific question, and introduce them to the thing that solves it. Uproad did it with tolls. The idea travels.
The Takeaway
Fraudulent DMCA takedowns are a real and growing nuisance, and Google deserves the criticism it is getting for a process this easy to abuse. Take it seriously, watch your pages, and know the mechanics before you need them.
But do not let the current alarm convince you this is some new existential threat. It is an old tactic having a loud moment. It happened to me in 2022 over an article that complimented the person who filed it, and a quick counter-notice put the page right back. File promptly, state the truth on the record, keep your evidence, and keep publishing. A baseless claim only wins if you let it make you quiet.
