How To Deal With Fake DMCAs

Fake DMCA takedowns and copyright claims are becoming a growing weapon in the SEO world, but what can you do when your own content is targeted? In this episode, David Bain is joined by Maria Sayapina, Sean Bianco, Daniel Lux and Ivana Flynn to look at how fraudulent claims are being used to manipulate search results, how to fight back, and what practical steps every site owner should know. Set a reminder to listen in and learn how to protect your rankings and content.

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Transcript

David Bain  

How to deal with fake DMCA’s. Hello and welcome to the August 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO Panel, discussing how to deal with fake DMCAs. 

I’m your host, David Bain, and joining us today are four great guests. Let’s meet them. Starting off with Ivana.

Ivana Flynn  

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. I am Ivana. I have been an SEO for many years, and lately I feel like a paralegal because I deal with all of these fake DMCAs that we will discover today what they are and how to deal with them. Thank you for having me.

David Bain  

Great introduction. Thanks for joining us, Ivana. Also with us today is Maria.

Maria Sayapina  

Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. And I have been in iGaming affiliation for the last 10 plus years, and I think the last two years have been a lot about fake DMCA, along with other challenges. But I think this is one of the hot topics recently.

David Bain  

One of the hot ones. Thank you so much, Maria. Daniel is with us today as well.

Daniel Lux  

Hello, I’m Daniel. I’m the founder of Linxact, and I’m a Black Hat SEO expert.

David Bain  

Wonderful, thank you, Daniel. And last but not least is Sean.

Sean Bianco  

Hey, Sean Bianco, founder at Gain Changer and iGaming SEO Boardroom, as a co-founder. And yeah, I mean, I work in the most hyper-competitive niches in iGaming, just like my friends over here. So when it comes to the stuff you have to deal with online, I think we’re covering a good segment of the internet in terms of hyper-competition. So this is going to be a fun one.

David Bain  

Okay, sounds good. So if you’re working in a hyper-competitive niche, then obviously, as Sean was saying there, you need to be aware of all the grey-ish activities that can go on. 

So, Ivana, what is a DMCA takedown?

Ivana Flynn  

Basically, somebody is after your visibility. DMCA was originally signed in 1998 by Bill Clinton to protect your digital work online. It’s a good thing. Somebody steals from you, you appeal, and they just take them down, saying, “Hey, you stole from someone”. 

However, some clever SEOs with a little bit of a twisted mind have decided to use these as a black-hat negative SEO attack. And in our industry, because there’s a lot of money streaming and you know being position 1, and 2 and 3, it’s real money, and they started to use this to take you down.

How it works is they basically say this is my content, submit it to Google through the Google form and Google just doesn’t have to act immediately. Currently I’m recovering things that were submitted 9th, 10th, 11 of April, so this is how much of a queue we created, and then Google just takes you down. 

They don’t check if the claim is true. According to the U.S. legislation, they need to take it down, and the burden of proof is on you. So if you want to be visible and indexable in Google again, which of course we all want to because this is SEO, then you need to go through the counter-noticing process and provide evidence that you did not steal, which is a very unsavory process, but this is what we deal with. 

iGaming, of course, it’s prone to all of these attacks, but we are not the only ones. If you are paying attention to all of these, you will see that Search Engine Land recently published why DMCA’s are here and why they are not disappearing, why they cannot go anywhere. Barry Schwartz recently published about the DMCAs, so they are everywhere, and people are starting to pay attention. 

I hope, even with this podcast, Google will start to pay attention and somehow perfect the takedown process because currently the takedown process is “I own the content”, and that’s it. There is no check to see if you are a real person. There is no ID check. There is no business check. You can be anyone. It’s super, super easy. If you are countering, you need to prove you are a real person. So I Google cannot just disobey the legislation, but maybe they can take the takedowns to a level where it’s a little bit more difficult.

David Bain  

So, Ivana, is there any likelihood that the burden of proof will shift to the person actually trying to take the content down, or is that not going to work either?

Ivana Flynn  

I would absolutely love that. At least, maybe not the burden of proof, but at least if they have to submit a real ID or business data, that they are real, because right now it’s just they take you down within seconds, and then you’re losing revenue almost immediately. 

The takedowns for them are for free, and this is the big scary thing, because negative SEOs come in different shapes and forms. We have link attacks, we have UGC link attacks, we have DDoS attacks, negative CTR attacks, and all of these are costly things. So you need to have a budget, 1,000s of euros, sometimes more, when it comes to good DDoS attacks. DMCA is for free. Just takes few seconds of your life, little bit of your soul and backbone, and then you’re done. You’re taking someone’s work down for no good reason, just because you want to be more visible and you don’t want to do the hard work. You want to take a shortcut, really.

David Bain  

So that sounds like a great definition to me. Maria, is there anything you’d like to add to what Ivana said about the definition of a DMCA takedown?

Maria Sayapina  

I think, from my end, what I can add is that we have been using DMCA tool for years before this, right? So we’ve been using it properly and it was working. Sometimes people copy your content, we’d see that copied site and we would go submit. And it has been used for years as a tool to fight copycats. 

It’s just in the recent years, I would say the last year or two, that started to unravel with the speed, which is I think it started very slowly, and right now it’s just affecting absolutely everyone. I think the worst part of this is that you can do prevention. There are ways and tools how to protect yourselves. However, no one can give you 100% guarantee that you’re protected and you’re doing everything right, even though you’re doing everything right. 

I think this is one of the scariest things, that you’re doing everything right by the book, but you don’t know if that will happen to you or not, and that’s I think is a very interesting position to be in.

David Bain  

Sean, do you want to add something there?

Sean Bianco  

Yeah, and I think something which is scary but has to be dealt with is that there is a certain cohort of SEOs out there that are starting to treat DMCAs, by definition, as a tool in their toolbox, and this is where things start getting problematic. 

So, when SEO start looking at DMCA as a tool which they can utilize, all of a sudden it goes away from the gentleman’s game of, hey, I’m going to do SEO better than you. And this was all something that we all used to do. We used to meet outside at conferences or whatnot, and like “ah you found the trick which got you up to number one right on these hyper competitive keywords I’ll get you next time”, but now it’s and I hope honestly I hope that people watching this podcast never have to experience this in their niches because to an extent this is like kind of encapsulated in hyper competitive niches, but now it’s also become a game of very clearly automated DMCA strikes happening consistently at times when people are either asleep or they’ll be busy or abroad.

It’s quite eloquent what’s going on. It’s basically been weaponized, and unfortunately there are a cohort of SEOs out there that are starting to look at a DMCA notice for either defamation, which is even worse, or for copyright notices, they are starting to look at it like a tool in their toolbox, just like outreach was, just like content was, just like link indexation was, and all of these other tools, which are let’s say the tools that people fight by and live by and do a better job by when they figure something out.

It got so bad, David, that in some cases people are not even trying to counter the notices, and they’re just trying to find different paths towards getting their site indexed again, whether that’s redirecting, double redirecting, triple redirecting, canonicalizing, and something to mention also is that when there’s DMCA strikes happening within your market, and if this is happening to you, it’s quite easy to figure out who’s actually benefiting from it. 

It’s quite easy to see the kinds of tactics that start being employed when this happens. You start noticing that sites, which aren’t built for long-term gains but are built to churn and burn, start coming up more frequently, right? Because the people that are perpetrating these actions are people who are opting purposely for short-term gains because they know that they’re going to be attacked by their competitors, also. 

It’s a very scary scenario when you’re in a market, and this becomes proliferated, and people start looking at it as a tool in their toolbox and not as something which is supposed to be used for its legitimate purpose.

David Bain  

Daniel, what are your thoughts? Do you agree with Sean that it’s getting so bad for some industries that you almost don’t have the resources to fight them, and you actually have to find other ways to deal with it, and maybe just ignore it to a certain degree?

Daniel Lux

I agree. The thing here is that negative SEO has existed for all the time SEO has existed, but DMCA takedowns made it a lot cheaper to perform negative SEO. So the asymmetry here of the attacker investing very little resources and creating a lot of damage on the brand side, for example, that basically made DMCA takedowns the number one negative SEO tool right now. So those black hat SEOs that are malicious, that attack brands, they basically lean on it a lot because it’s so efficient. So that’s why we see it everywhere. 

It’s much easier to take down a site via DMCA takedown than, for example, via a lot of links that basically inject the negative signal into the backlink profile.

David Bain  

So who is really doing this? Is it competitors? Is it scrapers, black hat agencies, other people out there? How can you quickly identify who’s doing this, and what can you quickly do about it?

Ivana Flynn  

We all know who is mainly doing it in our industry, and as well, if somebody writes about them, like Press Gazette, they send a DMCA takedown to the article that is written about them. Is not just to take your visibility, as well to stop spreading the truth. 

There are people who are absolutely petrified that we know about this, that we know about their tactics, and when you talk about it, you become the one being attacked. So yes, there is definitely not just one company, but one is very predominant in our industry, and others just figured out it works, so they are copying this approach.

As Daniel said, it’s super efficient because if you do any other attack, like negative CTR, it takes time, takes money, and the effect might happen, might not happen, might be a little bit, but DMCA’s are immediate. They take your five pages down that make you money. You’re done. Your revenue’s gone. And you can see in the markets when you are working with a client and you are protecting them and cleaning their DMCAs, and they suddenly stop. It’s because the attacker usually take the position one to three. It’s quite easy to see because they are persistent. 

So currently, I’m working with a client morning, evening, morning, evening, new DMCA on the same pages. Unless you are visible, even if we restore it, of course, because sometimes the restoration can be very fast. We are able to do it within 12 to 24 hours. But not all the time. 

Sometimes it gets stuck in a system, of course, but because you are being deindexed so many times, you’re dropping, and somebody else is climbing, and suddenly you can see the website being position one, two for the keywords that you were one, two, and then the attacks stop. 

But it’s quite obvious that the attack hasn’t stopped, because they already took your money. They already took your positions. So in the end, if you know how this market works, if you are keeping an eye on SERPs, you know exactly who’s after you.

David Bain  

How quickly do you have to deal with this? Because obviously, any time your page isn’t indexable, then it can’t be crawled, and Google could think that this page isn’t there anymore and doesn’t want to rank it anymore. 

Is there a certain amount of time that’s safe to leave it, or do you simply just have to deal with this as soon as possible? And if so, how do you identify straight away that DMCA notice has been filed?

Ivana Flynn  

Now, this is a tricky one because you need to act as soon as possible. I have a client and they left it for months. They were not paying attention to it because it was not their main pages. It was pages they didn’t really care about, and they got like 500 pages deindexed this way. 

Google is now thinking you are not countering, meaning you are actually stealing all of this content. They deranked all of the website. Even if it’s not your main keywords, you’re gonna be deranked. So you need to clean up almost immediately. And that is the problem. 

A lot of people still don’t understand that DMCA’s exist. They are just like, my pages are deindexed, and I don’t know why. It’s we who are talking about it and spreading the knowledge more and more, but I have lots of clients coming to me with SEO questions, and in the end, they are DMCA questions. So we try to act as soon as possible. 

Now, the detection of this is quite tricky because, yes, it is true that sometimes you get a notice in your Google Search Console, and you get this notice saying it says removals, and we are taking this page down because this person or this company complained, and this is the URL, and this is the notice, and that’s done. However, this doesn’t happen all the time. 

Many times, your pages disappear, and you don’t know why. So you need to find why, and you need to go through Lumen, which is a massive bottleneck. So that’s why we brought in Daniel here because he actually is a very clever person, and he created a tool for it to actually find all of the DMCA’s. Because we were all desperate, so we’re like, let’s work on this. 

So we created a tool that actually finds all the DMCA’s, tells you the page, and tells you the Lumen claim immediately. I don’t know how often it calls, every 24 hours, something like that. So you are informed, and it comes to your email or Slack or wherever you want. So we had to build some because Google didn’t give us that.

David Bain  

So that’s lumendatabase.org. Daniel, would you like to expand on that?

Daniel Lux

Google has had some kind of agreement with lumendatabase.org since the early 2000s. It is run by a professor from Harvard, and it’s basically a free service that is the only place where Google publishes all the DMCA notices. Google also runs a Transparency Report that exposes takedown notices, but it’s not complete. So if you want a complete view of everything, you need to go to lumendatabase.org.

In the Google SERPs, if you have a DMCA takedown, you can see at the bottom of the page that Google is referring to Lumen Notice IDs. So there’s a very strong connection between Google and lumendatabase.org for those notices, and if you want to, for example, see the notice details like the description or who filed it, you need to basically go to the link on the Lumen website, and to see more details, you need to put in your email, etc. It’s very inefficient to work with, especially if you’re a target and you’re really getting attacked and you have more URLs being down. 

With Ivana, we were able to build the DMCABoss, which is a tool that helps you get notified immediately, or the same day, when URLs of yours are getting attacked. Basically, it’s possible that you do not need all the information to file a counter notice to get it processed and also approved. This menas that you are not fully reliant on lumendatabase.org to do that.

Ivana Flynn  

Lumen was not built for SEOs. Lumen is built for researchers. So if you even want the API, it’s for researchers only. So it was never intended for us as SEOs. That’s why it’s so buggy: they don’t expect us to attack each other every time and flood them so many times. Lumen gives you this error because they don’t expect that amount of traffic. We are breaking it as we go and as we attack each other. 

Sorry to jump there. I just wanted to give a little bit more holistic view why Lumendatabase is not the best for us.

David Bain  

Maria, can a flood of fake notices function as a DDoS attack on rankings, and can it even damage the whole domain’s trust, not just individual URLs?

Maria Sayapina  

Yes, I think in one attack, because the DMCA attack is so automated right now. It’s so much easier to do now with all the AI and everything. So they’re attacking everything that they can. Obviously, not every submission is going to take down the site for different reasons. So they try to flood you with a lot of information. Some will take down the pages. Some might not. But either way, that attack has a negative effect, right? 

If you’ve been constantly bombarded with this, and if you’re getting those messages in the Search Console, you’re getting counter notice, which sometimes take, as Ivana said, from a couple of days to two weeks, three months, then this has inefficiency and probably also affects the budget of Google trying to crawl. So obviously, this is not healthy for any of the SEO sites. 

Things that can be done to prevent this: we have the DMCA check that supposedly crawls your site and makes sure that your content is is correct. However, some of the issues, because a lot of these attacks we’re talking about DMCA right now, but most of the time they happen together. You have DDoS, DMCA, backlinks attack all in the same week. So as you’re preventing a DDoS attack, your DMCA check wouldn’t crawl the site, so you become vulnerable. So you really need to be prepared to deal with this and prevent your crawl budget and your make sure that you’re allowing Googlebot to crawl and DMCA bot to crawl whilst not allowing DDoS bots to. 

So it gets really tricky, and I think on top of all of this, there are attacks that last for one day, two days a week, and then there are prolonged ones. Imagine you’re being attacked for a month or two like this. You get exhausted, and I think this is where Sean was making a point, where people just don’t want to deal with this, and they just redirect because it’s one thing I think to deal with this for a day or two or three, maybe a week, two months of constant attacks. You just want to give up and it’s also kind of made for the exhaustion at some point.

David Bain  

Sean, there are some takedown requests that are actually in good faith. What would you say is the percentage of requests that are actually in bad faith versus good faith? And what are the red flags that take down isn’t bad faith, rather than a legitimate dispute?

Sean Bianco  

I’ve never seen a legitimate dispute, so I can’t talk about that. But I do see, and have to deal with, all of the negative ones constantly and consistently. Thankfully, LLMs have guardrails, because if they didn’t, this would be 10 times worse than it is right now because everyone would be doing it, not just the few who’ve created potentially what I’m assuming are scripts to run this automatically. 

I think something that needs to be noted over here also, which hasn’t been discussed, is that this isn’t something happening on some corner of the internet that is limited to this corner of the internet. I’ve seen billion-dollar brands get hit by DMCA strikes and be removed from Google’s search results. I’ve seen people, and I’ve helped recover people with Ivana, who have been hit with DMCA strikes for six months. 

To Maria’s point, and to your point also, David, suddenly we’re not ranking as well on other keywords. When you lift everything and you lift them fast, then all of a sudden, not only do those pages that have been removed from in terms of content start ranking, but also other pages which they were not performing that well on start ranking. 

There are so many ways that DMCA can be used in addition to what I’m currently seeing. I’m scared to say it, because I think if people get even more creative than they are now, who knows what could happen. Because there are ways where you won’t even be able to deal with a DMCA strike in many cases, depending on how people attack a website. 

It’s important to note, as Maria said, that if you do start seeing this in your industry, don’t just go. You’re going to get exhausted. In our industry, which is a hyper-competitive industry, before it used to be a game of being better than everyone else. Now you also have to be not only good at claiming positions, but you have to be equally as good as holding those positions. Not only from the DMCA perspective, but from every perspective. 

It’s not enough to be an SEO expert anymore. You have to be an SEO and negative SEO recovery and identification expert.

Maria Sayapina  

Just to add on to the legitimate attack, as you said, you haven’t seen it. I actually recently, two days ago, I’ve seen UKCG filing a complaint for non-promotional stock pages, which is good because that’s how the tool should be. And obviously you can see the difference of the quality of the submission as well. So when it’s an automated AI submission, its just like a random site you copied it from, like times.com or something, and then you see a proper way how it should work. There’s UKCG submitting why it’s non-compliant, why it should be taken down, and it’s like, well, it’s actually there is a purpose for this tool, and it should be working how it’s supposed to be, and I just hope that more of the legitimate takes down should be happening because to support your claim, Sean, like there is other sides that should be taken down because they are not promoting the right content, right?

So we do need something like that tool. It’s just what’s the filter? Who can submit something, kind of like you the creation of the Jira tickets? Certain fields should be compulsory. Who is submitting the request? Can you identify yourself? What is the benefit to your business and so on and so forth? Not just fill up certain fields and you’re done. 

That’s just to kind of answer David’s question, because there are some requests that are working in favour, however, there’s so little of them versus the other flood of what’s happening with AI and automation.

David Bain  

So, what are the ways to try to ensure that a solid counter notice is delivered? What are the key elements that are part of that, and what’s a realistic timeline to get reinstated? 

Ivana, you mentioned that you’ve managed to get pages reinstated within about 12 hours or so. What’s the average? What’s a good aim in terms of timescale to get reinstated, and what are the key elements to incorporate as part of this counter notice?

Ivana Flynn  

First of all, I want to say it depends on your industry. I recently learned that if you are doing a counter notice outside of iGaming, it can be within an hour, and I was amazed. The queue of attacks is not so huge, so it was within an hour. I was like, “Wow, how did this happen?”. I just helped a friend with something and I was questioning how it happened so fast. 

For iGaming, I think realistically you can aim at the 12 to 20-four hours if you are doing it properly, which means you are using the correct URL, because people tend to go to wrong submission places, it’s there is a one long one with a question mark that you should use. But people usually click on the one that is in the notices that come to Google Search Console. This one takes months for some strange reason. 

If you’re using the correct one, it’s fast as well. You are providing the correct data, which means which URL was attacked. Try to give them the Lumen notice because if you don’t give them the information, there is an automation on the other end. They need to start to look into it. If it gets to a human, it takes months. If you help automation to understand that your page is real and you provide enough evidence to to show them that you are online for five years with the same content, then you are gonna go through fast. 

However, people get emotional, and people flood the counter notice with lots of information that shouldn’t even be there. How many clicks they lost, and how many impressions, and how much revenue? And now the AI bot is completely lost. As you know, AI works with tokenisation. Tokens cost money. If you make it that it can resolve it within 10 tokens, not 200 tokens, you win. It is the same thing. So you need to be super efficient. 

I had a client, and they actually created a very beautiful legal letter and printed it and sent it to the headquarters of Google in Silicon Valley. This is a digital claim. You need to take care of it digitally. Okay, printed letters are not going to help you. I understood what they were trying to do. There was a legal appeal against their pages that were attacked, but that went nowhere. Then they came to me, and within 12 hours we were back. 

Be efficient. Just give the absolutely core information. Don’t waste the tokens. If you’re wasting tokens, you are just making problem for for the AI and making problem for yourself.

David Bain  

Just to clarify, are you saying that you can automate dealing with this, and so you can use AI to do the counter notifications?

Ivana Flynn  

I think you could. However, I do it manually, but what I do every time, and I always check myself because I don’t know how great automation is going to do. I saw people trying to do automation that takes months. You could, but when I do it one by one manually, it goes faster. But I’m sure you can automate anything these days.

Daniel Lux  

First of all, you need to be aware that you are taken down. I think this part of the optimisation is very important. So either you use our tool or you build one yourself, where you basically detect that one of your URLs is deindexed and has a notice, like a takedown notice, in the Google SERP, so you can react to it. 

I think this is the biggest issue because there are brands out there that have like 10,000 URLs and they literally can’t check them by hand. So having a system in place that is covering the detection of an incoming takedown notice thing is key. 

For filing counter notices, if you have a good template, you can structure it and use features like Chrome autofill, make small adjustments, and then get them sent to Google.

David Bain  

So, Sean, obviously, the best way to deal with something is to try to ensure it doesn’t happen to begin with. What can site owners do to proactively reduce their risk of this happening? Elements like, I guess, time stamping of content, the different monitoring, watermarking, things like that. What would you say about that?

Sean Bianco  

The number one advice: don’t be successful in SEO in a hyper competitive niche. Just rank on page 10, right? The second that you rank on page one of Google, or in position one, you are like a wild pig, and everyone gets out their guns and starts shooting at you. So this is effectively how it’s working in hyper-competitive niches right now. 

If you do well, people are going to find a way to take you down. So you can prepare whatever you want to try and circumvent it. But once you have 50, 60, 100, 1,000, 2,000 DMCA strikes coming at your brand every single day, there’s no amount of protection that you can put into place to stop it from happening.

And there are different types of DMCA strikes. We started seeing one which is actually several ones which are hitting root domains, not only specific pages. Recently, people are even cheeky enough to do this, where let’s say they use the “nuclear warhead”, specifically on the day of a Google update, so people start scratching their heads. How is it that I lost all of my rankings? I must be that I got hit by a spam update over here. 

I’m sure there are loads of best practices, but let’s be quite honest. This is not something where best practices really apply. This is something which has been weaponized. It’s being used to remove people from search results. 

In my opinion, you have two options. Option one is that you get really good at counter-noting and dealing with the whole process that Ivana’s been talking about at extreme length. So I won’t go into that in more detail. So when it takes longer, how do you get it to go back to being shorter? How do you speed up the process as much as possible? 

Unfortunately, you have to accept this because currently, Google is not coming to save you. Google is under an obligation, as far as I’m aware, a legal obligation, and I think it persists specifically to the United States, but it doesn’t persist to the European Union, and we are suffering the results of it in the European Union, and there’s nothing, as far as I’m aware, from a legal perspective, that European Union entities can do to protect themselves against this, let’s say, trauma. So this is something which is facilitated by Google. It’s causing damage to your site, and you have to get extremely good at dealing with it. 

If you are being attacked consistently, you have to come to terms with the fact that you are going to be down every two days, so you recover what you recover. If you are in a hyper-competitive niche where there’s money to be made in high ranking keywords, you’re going to be up for two days. On the third day, you’re going to be down. Then it’s a game of cat and mouse where you go, you recover it, you’re down, you’re up again for another two days, and then you’re down, and it just keeps on going. 

You have to play that game because Google is not coming to save you, at least not now. Google, maybe you can hear this if you’re listening. Maybe you should change something to make it a little bit of a better process. 

Or option number two is you change your strategy completely. You go from a single asset approach to a multi-asset approach, where you start learning how to do things such as authority funneling, recycling of authority, and you start ensuring that once you do get hit, you know how to recover it and migrate your authority elsewhere and have multiple legs to stand on, not just one asset. So, again, David, if you start getting hit by this in a non-competitive, non-competitive environment, as Ivana mentioned, you’re more than likely going to be able to recover it really fast. It’s not a problem.

But when you start getting you know automated hits, the queue starts increasing and things take way longer. As Maria said previously, it’s either an endurance thing and you start becoming an endurance fighter of a negative SEO protection, or you go on the attack, not by utilizing the DMCA, but you go on the attack by having a multi-domain strategy where if you do get hit, you’re always going to have one domain which is ranking instead of the other.

David Bain  

One thing, Sean, that you mentioned is that some people will actually attempt a DMCA takedown on the day of a Google update, and SEOs have really struggled to determine what happened. 

Maria, if as an SEO you see a sudden reduction in rankings and traffic, how do you quickly identify what has happened?

Maria Sayapina  

It’s quite easy, right? You go to Google and you check on the SERPs. I think right now, the SERPs are your best friend. If you’re not on SERP, you’re out of SERP. So what can be done is, you either got manual penalty, and you can check that with Google, or you got DMCA, and you check the Lumen database. 

I think you can know what happened pretty much instantly, because if you’re ranking position 1/2/3 on the top competitive keyword, you’ll know immediately that something is wrong. 

Even if there are instances where something happens with Google, for example, I’ve noticed recently that clicks are going down for a couple of hours and that something is wrong, I think there was just a glitch, but I just check the SERP, check the manual actions, check the Lumen database, and it’ll be clearer what has happened.

I think it’s pretty standard for anyone in the gaming industry to check what’s happening in the SERPs. Obviously, if you’re ranking, I don’t know, second page of Google and so on, it’s much harder because from getting a few clicks to the indexing, you wouldn’t see maybe that much of a big change. But yeah, obviously, if you’re ranking, you’re seeing the drop like instantly. It’s right to the heart, and it’s not a nice feeling, but you deal with this, right? You go counter notice. You see if it’s a manual action. You do all the steps. 

And another part is that we have had so many different things that have happened on top of that, right? DMCA. Even if you take down, you see canonical redirects domain coming up there, so it’s a very interesting world we live in. 

But I would say when it comes to DMCA, you just go SERP, check your SERPs for your keywords for domains, and there are tons of keyword ranking tools out there, and I think sometimes they all show different results. Just get a good VPN and start checking the SERPs yourselves, or get a DataForSEO scraper, and check your keywords at whatever time you need to check them. The SERPs and checking them is the best tool against knowing what has happened to your page in Google.

David Bain  

Ivana, an SEO’s job is getting broader and broader, isn’t it? So when does this stop being an SEO problem and become a legal one?

Ivana Flynn  

The first time I heard of DMCA was January 2024, and I remember having a call with client and they were panicking, and together we were trying to figure out what’s going on. That was the first time I saw it, and then I saw a few throughout the rest of the year, but now, I do it every day. I started to deal with the DMCA’s in early March, and ever since I’m dealing with it every single day. So I would say, once the DMCA became part of everyday SEO’s life, then it became part of our job. 

SEO is never stable. It’s never we do just links, we do just content. So we are very ready to take on a new challenge. I think we are the most flexible people in any industry. Whatever you throw at us, we will learn how to work with it. So it’s not really a shock that it changed. 

For me, the shock is how effective it is and how much Google is allowing it. That this is happening is just new form of negative SEO. As Daniel said, it was always here. Once it was more linked, then it was more DDoS, then it was more this, then it was more that. Right now is DMCA’s, and I’m afraid they are here to stay, because they are too effective, too cheap, and Google doesn’t help. 

One more very important thing that I don’t think we mentioned, and people should hear: if you are hit by DMCA in Google, you disappear in Google. You are still visible in Bing. You are still findable in Yahoo or DuckDuckGo or anything else. This affects only Google search because it’s submitted to Google platform, and people many times do not realize it because they see in their Google Analytics, for example, that the page is still getting traffic, and then they are convinced they were not hit by it, even though you show them it’s not working in Google. In Google, you have this DMCA, but because there is still traffic, they get confused. 

So be aware that the page is still live. People can still directly go to it. They can still find it through other search engines. However, you disappeared in Google, and let’s be honest, Google is still the king of the SEO traffic for us.

David Bain  

Let’s finish off by getting everyone in the panel’s views on what’s one thing that an SEO can do now in relation to either finding out more information about DMCA takedowns, or one action that they can take in relation to that, and then just confirming who you are and where people can find you. 

So, shall we start off with Maria? What’s one thing that an SEO can do now to either find out more or action something in relation to DMCA’s?

Maria Sayapina  

I think whoever is watching this podcast is off to a good start so they get an overview of what’s happening. If someone has never dealt with DMCA, I suggest just going to LumenDatabase.org, checking your domain. If there is anything there, learn about it. I think there are a lot of articles about it, but just educate why this is happening and why people are doing this. Because really and truly, the tool has been created to serve to remove certain content from the internet, it’s just been used wrongly.

You can find me working at Find.co. I’m working for a iGaming affiliation and dealing with the DMCA requests, or on LinkedIn. We do a lot of podcasts and discussions with this group, and we have a lot of meetings outside and different conferences. So recently, DMCA has been a big topic for us.

David Bain  

Lovely, thank you, Maria and Daniel. What’s the final thought that you’d like to leave the listener with, and where can people find you?

Daniel Lux

Yeah, so Google Search Console won’t always notify you on time, or even at all, so don’t trust the Google Search Console for being notified for DMCA takedown notices. Check yourself, check your sites in the SERPs, and take control and don’t just rely on trust. 

People can find me on linxact.com and on LinkedIn.

David Bain  

Thank you so much, Daniel, and also the same to Sean.

Sean Bianco  

So, I mean, shameless plug over here, I guess, but we built the iGaming SEO Boardroom specifically for providing people on information on how to deal with DMCA strikes, negative SEO, and to stay one-step ahead of the competition with heavily guarded secrets when it comes to how to do SEO in hyper-competitive markets. So that is iGamingSEOBoradroom.com. 

You can go over there, click to join the waitlist, add your details, and there’s quite a backlog. But if you’re accepted, you get added to a private community of people who are dealing with this every single day, and who help each other get out of it.

You can go and type in Sean Bianco on LinkedIn, and you’ll find me there quite easily.

David Bain  

Thanks so much, Sean. And last but not least, Ivana. Ivana, what are your final thoughts, and where can people find you?

Ivana Flynn  

You can find pages being de-indexed with DMCABoss, and make sure that you love the archive. If your pages are not in the archive, your claim is going to be much more difficult. So those are my top tips for how to stay safe and vigilant. 

You can find me usually on my LinkedIn, Ivana Flynn, unless it’s attacked by the people that are doing the DMCAs because I talk about it too much. I also have a YouTube channel where I talk an extreme amount on DMCA’s and all the other negative SEOs. All of these people have been my guests, so that’s at iGamingSEOBoardroom. You will find it on LinkedIn, on YouTube, hopefully on LinkedIn as well.

David Bain  

Thank you so much for joining, everyone. 

I’ve been your host, David Bain, and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars, and of course, check out SEOin2026.com too.

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