Proper way to file DMCA complaint with Google?

[birdstuff]

Hello. I need a bit of advice here. Two days ago I noticed that the traffic and revenue from my primary site had dropped by 2/3, literally overnight. A quick Google check showed that hundreds of pages that have been in the top 10 for their search terms for years are now nowhere to be found in the first 1,000 results.

Suspecting a serious duplicate content issue, I selected a unique text string from the home page and Googled it only to discover that at least two dozen scumbags had made exact copies of my entire site - including the logo and copyright notice at the bottom. Also, the "Wayback Machine" clearly shows that all of these stolen pages existed on my site long before the knockoffs, including the home page. I contacted the hosting companies but some are off-shore so I'm not holding my breath.

This really ticks me off as I have personally written these articles and "how-to's" on 4,000 odd pages beginning in 2003 - all of which have been copied.

My question is this: How do I go about filing DMCA complaints on all of the offending pages? Google's instructions are as follows:

"FOR WEB SEARCH, YOU MUST IDENTIFY EACH SEARCH RESULT THAT DIRECTLY LINKS TO A WEB PAGE THAT ALLEGEDLY CONTAINS INFRINGING MATERIAL. This requires you to provide (a) the search query that you used, and (b) the URL for each allegedly infringing search result."

Does this mean they want a search term and URL for EVERY infringing page or can I simply submit the home page of the infringing sites and tell them that every link they follow from that page will take then to another infringing page?

If one is required to report each and every infringing page the task is hopeless.

Thanks for your help and advice.

[stapel]

Have you considered contacting the hosting services of the plagiarisers, and getting their sites shut down? That would surely go a long way toward getting them removed from Google....

Eliz.

[birdstuff]

Yes, but most of the infringing sites are hosted in other countries and I've had little luck getting similar sites taken down in the past. I have contacted the hosting companies however and we'll see how it goes. I really need to get them booted from Google which will effectively boot them from the web.

[outland88]

What is this stolen content predominantly being used for? What percentage is found in the supplemental results?

Most cases I have heard lately that involved such a large amount of pages usually involved one Adsense user hijacking another. It seems to be quickly replacing “click armies”.

[stapel]

birdstuff opined:

...most of the infringing sites are hosted in other countries....

Well, yeah; that usually stinks....

Eliz.

[birdstuff]

None of them are running AdSense, and about 2/3 of them are in the supplemental results. It's the other 1/3 that's killing my rankings.

[outland88]

So are you saying these sites are stealing your content with no other purpose other than that? That does seem unusual.

[jdMorgan]

We had a discussion last year about one particular 'flavor' of apparent content theft, and it might be useful to check to see if it is the case here.

There were some servers in the far east that were mirroring sites. That is, they were proxying the content through their servers, and making it available as <yourdomain>.theirdomain.com. At the time, it looked to me like an effective dodge for government-mandated domain filters.

One way to see if this is the case is to make a minor change to one or a few of your pages. If this change is seen instantly on the other sites, then they are not copying your site but rather mirroring it, as described above. And since the proxy request comes to your server, and you just made a request, you can find the requesting proxy's IP address in your raw server logs, and block it if you so desire.

Or you could block that IP address range only it if the user-agent is any well-known search engine robot. This has the advantage of removing those dup-content entries, but leaving your content accessible to those who must use the mirrors to reach the "free Web."

Anyway, just an idea. It would be worthwhile to find out if your site has been copied or mirrored.

Jim