Ivan Flynn discusses why businesses must tackle negative SEO attacks, even if they keep happening.
DMCAs (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) have become one of the most successful and used negative SEO attacks in 2026, they are fast and effective and a real threat to any victim’s revenue.
It is where malicious actors file fraudulent copyright infringement claims with search engines like Google against their competitors.
Negative SEO attacks have always been here in different shapes and forms.
One of the oldest and most well known is spammy links attacks. These days this one has morphed from normal spammy links to UGCs (user-generated content) such as, forum comments, profiles, wikis, guestbooks, among others, with irrelevant anchors and links to your website.
The goal is to change the distribution of anchor texts of backlinks pointing to a website. This tactic is widely used today and often in combination with other attacks.
Any negative SEO attacks could cost your business money, whether its DDoS attacks, UGCs, spammy links and even negative click-through rate tactics, which could cost several thousand euros.
The massive threat of DMCA is that submitting fake claims is free and works like magic – your pages are de-indexed in minutes.
Why does this work so well and why is it not going to stop?
DMCA attacks are now taking place outside of igaming and are used to remove uncomfortable contents from big websites like PressGazette. Recovery takes time and the burden of proof is on you.
Appealing a DMCA attack
If you get a fake DMCA takedown, do not panic. You can appeal here and make sure to to fill in all requested data such as country, name, address, delisted URL (you can do more URLs in bulk but you will have more success doing them one by one).
Justification is important, but keep it short and informative. Do not overwhelm the justification with emotions and pointless data that are not helpful for recovery.
You are dealing with an emotionless AI lawyer on the other end, so keep it as short and simple as possible.
The good news is, the first attacks are usually cleaned up fast. However the real threat comes with the repetitive attacks on the same URLs as Google does not have a successful recovery system for these instances.
If you submit counter notice (as that would be the correct approach) you would most likely get this reply:
“Thanks for reaching out to us. We have already responded to, or are in the process of responding to, your request to restore the following URLs. […] We ask that you not send previously-submitted URLs in future notices.”
This means, the new appeal is not going through, you can try to follow up, but usually that does not lead to results.
I would recommend trying to go via legal form where you can explain that this is a repetitive attack on the same URL. You can use this form if you get this reply and it is a mistake, aka you are sure your pages are under DMCA attacks:
“We are unable to process your counter notice […]. Our records show that we did not take action on these URLs in response to a copyright removal request.”
When filling out the form, you have only 1,000 characters, be very precise with the data you provide. You can attach supporting files too – I recommend using screenshots of any communication, Lumen text, DMCA claim in SERPs
This can take anything from 48 hours to 2 weeks before the page is restored.
Monitoring is key to prevention
Once you manage to recover it all, make sure to monitor all pages as repetitive attacks are very common.
But once again, I would preach prevention. At DMCA, you can register your top money pages, add the badge to your website. It does not work 100% but it fights a lot of fake claims successfully.
DMCAs are here to stay at least for now, that is a very sad truth.
As long as the SEO terrorists are succeeding to hurt your traffic, they will not stop.
Google is unlikely to stop acting on all the fake reports as DMCA is a part of US legislation – this means that it often removes first and asks questions later.
The key point is that Google is not deciding ownership in the same way a court would. Google is primarily following a legal notice-and-takedown process designed to preserve its DMCA safe harbor protections.
DMCA abuse is no longer a rare occurrence reserved for the most competitive niches. It has become a mainstream negative SEO tactic, because it is cheap for attackers, difficult for victims, and often effective.
Until search engines improve their handling of repetitive fraudulent claims, website owners must assume that a successful site will eventually become a target.
Monitor your assets, document your ownership, and challenge every false takedown. The more fake DMCAs you manage to recover, less of them will go through in the future.
DMCA.com can help to keep your content live and fake attacks free, while DMCABoss can help you monitor and fight all attacks that go through.
The cost of ignoring a fake DMCA claim is often far greater than the effort required to fight it.
