An SEO professional was asking about a manual action they received, and was curious about DMCA requests.
They found someone who was charging $199 USD per site in order to take down the offending sites. They are concerned about the large cost associated with this.
They exported the list of the external domains on their site and found that they’re a bunch of sites that have stolen and copied their content.
As a result of this discovery, the SEO professional submitted a DMCA takedown of the sites.
They were able to take down around nine sites total.
However, every time they took down a site, the spammer put up another site with exactly the same content to replace the one that was taken down.
Furthermore, they saw a large loss of links, and then they received the manual action.
Their main concern is about the loss of links, and they are unsure about how to deal with the situation.
John explained that there may be multiple things at play.
For the DMCA process, it should be free. If someone is charging you money, then it sounds like a third-party is submitting these requests in your name.
DMCA complaints are something that’s free. So, make sure that you submit them on Google.
If you run into someone that’s charging for these DMCA complaints, then you might want to report them to the abuse address. There should be no charge associated with filing DMCA complaints.
The other thing: if you can remove the content, you can use the full disavow links tool in Google Search Console.
You have to search for it separately on Google in the Help Center. But, if you submit the entire list of 400 domains, you can use the domain directive in the Disavow file.
That way, you can disavow all of the links from those domains at once.
Google can then ignore them in their systems, and this can also work for the manual action.
Additionally, regarding the manual action: the manual actions team would not take a manual action because of someone else copying your website.
These manual actions are done manually by this team, so they would normally only submit them based on their own findings.
What John thinks happened is that there could be a mistake that occurred with a manual action, which is always possible.
However, there could also be another link issue with your website that you need to resolve first.
He recommends they visit the Help forums, post about the situation, and get input from other people on these forums. Some of them might have different tools for looking at links, and so on.
This would help them get better clarification and confirmation of the story.
Traditionally, however, DMCA requests should not result in a manual action for links. This is an entirely unrelated issue.
This happens at approximately the 18:45 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 7 18:45
Yeah, um, like, three weeks ago, I received a message from Google. It says manual action, unnatural links to my website. So um, I export the list of the domains—external domains—to my website. And I find out that they’re more harmless websites that copy our content. It’s got the whole website design and content.
And some websites, this could be a part of some page of my website. And I didn’t see the reason that why I get the manual action. And I don’t know how to take down these copied websites. So I can just serve it on DMCA to take down a website, and this cost me one website is $199 USD to take down this website.
And I see the list that’s term of 500 websites. And I think the cost of take down these copy website will be huge. And our technical developer try to take down them, but only nine websites. And there are a lot more.
And after I took down that website, they recreate a new website that copy our content. And in our content there are internal links.
So in Search Console, we see there are lots of unnatural links to my website. And I got a manual action. So I don’t know how to deal with this situation.
John 20:51
Okay. So I think there might be multiple things at play. On the one hand, for the DMCA process, it should be free. So if, if there’s someone charging you money for it, then that sounds like some, I don’t know, third party company that is submitting them in your name. Because usually submitting DMCA complaints is something that is free.
So it’s free to submit them on Google. It’s something that you can submit directly to the host through their abuse address, for example. And there should be no charge associated with that.
So if you ran into someone who’s charging you money for DMCA complaints, then I suspect that it’s not, it’s not a legitimate DMCA complaint there. So that’s, that’s kind of the one thing. The other thing is what you can also do, for cases like this, where you can’t remove the content, you can use the Disavow Links functionality in Search Console.
It’s not directly built into Search Console, so you have to search for it separately in the Help Center. But you can use that to submit whole domains. So you can make a list of those 400 domains. You can use the domain name directive in the disavow file, and just submit all of those to us. And that way, we will know that you don’t want these links counted, and we can just ignore them for our systems.
And that can also work for the manual action. The other thing, I think, which is perhaps more relevant, is usually the manual actions team would not take a manual action just based on someone else copying your website. So for the most part, the manual actions that you receive are done manually by the Web Spam Team.
They review the situation for your website. And based on what they find, then they submit a manual action, if there’s something that our systems can’t filter out on their own. And for things like just purely copied websites, like some spammer is copying your website, that’s something our systems can deal with fairly well.
And that’s not something that we would do a manual action for. So that means to me, either, maybe there was a mistake with a manual action, it’s, it’s always possible. Or there is some other kind of link-related issue with your website that you need to resolve first. So from my point of view, what I will try to do here is maybe go to the Help forums and post about your situation and get some input from other people as well.
Some of them have different tools for looking up links. And that way, you can get a little bit clearer of a confirmation of, is this really something that I did, which maybe I didn’t know that you shouldn’t be doing it like this, or is it something that maybe Google got confused? And I just need to tell Google, like, you should figure it out kind of thing.
So that’s that, I think the more important part that I will try to figure out is, is there really a link-related issue that I need to resolve or not? And the copied sites, I would see something you can take care of, but it’s not something that traditionally would result in a manual action for links.
