What to Do if Someone is Stealing Your Content
- January 22, 2022
- Bradley Taylor
Unfortunately there are lazy and nefarious webmasters out there who simply copy and paste your content and use it as their own. What’s even worse is that they may actually show up in Google rankings ahead of you for that same content. It has happened to us. In this article we will show you how to get it removed.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law in 1998 and it provides content creators with the ability to protect their content against thieves. Whether the thieves stole your content because they are trying to steal your juice or if it that they are just plain lazy is irrelevant. The fact is that it can be harmful to your overall SEO efforts.
Here are the instruction to get stolen material removed from Google listings:
Google DMCA Removal Request
- Go to Copyright Removal dashboard.
- Log in with your Google account.
- Select Create a New Notice.
- Fill out contact information.
- Fill out copyrighted work details.
- Add your infringed work details.
- Select Sworn Statements.
- Submit.
Google publishes data relating to links they have taken down over the years. You can view that info here. Recently Google SEO Guru John Mueller stated that Google would remove the infringing material and that you should get credit for the original post. I’ll be honest, sometimes I get the feeling he doesn’t know if he what he is saying is the actual truth. I think Google is such a large machine that nobody there knows how all of it works or the totality of all of its moving parts. The best thing you can do is to perform the steps recommended by Google. Outside of this, you can hire an attorney and take the offender to court.
We hope this guide has been helpful in your pursuit of removing stolen content from Google.
