DMCA Takedowns - What To Know.

One of the most ubiquitously known tools in any web developer or author's arsenal is commonly referred to as the "DMCA takedown." It is named after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was modern society's initial legislative push to define how authors can protect their claims to their digitally uploaded content from plagiarists and other bad actors. Anyone can feasibly copy someone else's existing digital content and paste it onto a different domain for their own benefit. Therefore, it is important for whoever originally wrote the content that they are able to lodge a complaint against other websites that recreate the content word-for-word without appropriate crediting.

Generally, it is a straightforward process to have digital plagiarists penalized in terms of Google's ranking algorithms for its search service. The most efficient way of proving oneself to have been the author who had first posted a given piece on the Internet is to find an externally recorded cache that can demonstrate the date on which the work was first indexed by search engines. One of the most popular outlets providing this service is the Wayback Machine.

Occasionally, content from one's website can appear on other sites in ways that might make proving one's original ownership seem more difficult. For example, a website that has remained inactive for many years may have its content stolen by someone who is relatively confident that the original uploader will never check up on their past work, and the plagiarized content may be interspersed with lines of original text. Since Google's algorithms do regard how often a website updates its content as an important factor in determining how high it appears in SERPs, the thief may end up overtaking the original website in the rankings.

Nevertheless, one should have faith that Google's systems would have awarded the original version of the content with "canonical" status indicating when and where it was first uploaded. A DMCA takedown should work regardless if one has proof provided by a web archive, though it may be more difficult if the plagiarist modified the text beyond a particular originality threshold. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/jtd6ce/site_went_down_for_a_year_someone_is_ranking_w_my/.