DMCA Takedown Requests Can Help Webmasters Protect Their Search Engine Rankings

Google rightfully penalizes the SEO rankings of websites that are made up of content duplicated from other websites. While this is meant to discourage those who run mirror websites or would otherwise try to steal the potential success of a competitor, particularly unscrupulous webmasters may see value in weaponizing this process against their targets' businesses by diluting the SEO prospects that the targeted websites are going for. Such a malicious website can even add the same content practically as soon as the target updates itself with new content; this is typically done by using a program called an RSS aggregator to notify the user of any change made to a particular website and showcase exactly what changes were made to the syntax.

Generally, it is more common for a website that exists by leeching off the success of another site to plagiarize pieces of that other website's content than to directly exist as a complete clone of the site. Regardless, a victim can easily defend himself by filing a complaint with Google that contains some kind of proof that the victim's own site is the original. One fairly easy way to prove this is to point out comment syntax that is identical between the code of the two sites. Google can be expected to take the offending website off its index in a matter of weeks on the legal basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The webmaster of the victimized site should also send a cease and desist letter to the aggressor; if the cloned website fails to comply, a DMCA takedown request can be sent to its host as well. While Google is the most prominently used search engine by far, any number of alternative engines will likely have indexed the clone at the original website's expense, so it is up to the webmaster to decide how many other search engines should receive DMCA notices. Adding "canonical" tags to the syntax is the easiest method of ensuring that all of a website's new pieces of content will be recognized by search engines as originating from that site. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/cezrn3/someoneiscloningmysiteandbeing_listed/.