Copyright/DMCA Issues
Copyright regulations may affect websites that appear to have copied content from another site. DMCA takedown requests are often used to help remove plagiarized content. Within the SEO Office Hours recaps below, we report on how Google handles copyright and DMCA issues on websites – and provide a collection of tips for websites dealing with their content being copied.
For more on website content best practices for SEO, read our Guide to Optimizing Website Content for Search — or explore our Website Intelligence Academy resources on SEO & Content.
Google Will Take Into Consideration The Number of Valid DMCA Complaints a Site Has For Rankings
The number of valid DMCA complaints is something that is taken into consideration when ranking a site, as confirmed by Google in a blog post from 2012. If you incorrectly receive these and flag them as wrong they should be removed and will not cause an issue. However, if your site is continuing to collect them, Google systems may pick up on this.
Google Removes Pages With DMCA Notices From Search & Displays Message in SERPs
If a DMCA notice is active, Google will remove that page from search and display a notice in the search results. In GSC there is a link to the process where you can contend a DMCA notice.
Report Sites Scraping Your Content to Google on Page-By-Page Basis
If your site has been scraped you can submit a DMCA takedown to the website’s hosting service, and to Google’s legal team can investigate. This is required on page level and cannot be done at a site level.
Repeated DMCA Requests May Cause a Penalty
Google’s algorithms may penalise a site which gets a lot of DMCA requests and is taking content from other sources over a long period.
DMCAs May Impact Search Results
An excessive number of DMCA requests could have an impact on your search results although the impact and method of penalty is vague.