Copyright Theft and Google Rankings

[RetBit]

Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more.

Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us.

I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape.

What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?

[EGOL]

I know how frustrating it can be when your work is grabbed by spammers.

We have work that has been wildly grabbed and republished by spammers in a competitive industry.  Our approach was to get educated about copyright and fair use, get an attorney ready to help, if needed, and then attack the spammers with DMCA, complaints to Adsense and complaints to hosts.  At first it seemed hopeless, but after nearly 200 DMCA's to Google and a lot of complaints to Adsense and hosting companies we are now seeing rewarding results.

If you are fighting this it is important to identify the spammers and then see if any high quality sites are linking to them, and then go after those links by letting the linking webmasters know that you are the real source of the information.  Before you do that be sure that your online information is totally better than what the spammers have put up.  If the spammers have up your whole collection and you only have half of it up then you are not as attractive of a link target.

Attacking with DMCA is the minimum.  Send them to Google search while logged into your Google account and use the Copyright Removal Dashboard.  That makes it easy for Google to see the mass of complaints that you are throwing at them.  It also makes it fast and easy to file several complaints every morning.

If those sites are running Adsense, attack their income stream.   Visit their site while logged into your adsense account.   Then click on the "ad choices" button in the upper right corner of an Adsense ad on their page.  That will take you to an Adsense Help page titled, "about google ads".   Scroll down to the bottom of that page and you will see "Leave feedback on the website or ad you just saw".   Click "the ads".  Then click "Adwords ad feedback form".  Then click on "An ad violates other AdWords policies".    Use that form to complain that they are publishing your copyrighted content.  I have found that the Adsense team often turns off the ads on those pages promptly and sometimes turns the ads off across the entire website.

Look at the Adsense codes on the websites to see if the same publisher code is used on lots of these sites.  If you find this then hammer those sites with complaints.   Be sure you let them know that these sites have MANY pages that contain stolen content to which you own copyright.  Complain that the same publisher has lots of websites, each with lots of your content.    Complain with enthusiasm.

Hosting companies will often respond by deleting images, pages or text that are your copyrighted content.  They might also delete entire sites.

Keep in mind that submitting DMCA, attacking their Adsense or getting them kicked off of their hosting can make people really mad.   So, be sure that you are within your right and they are not making fair use of your content.  Google or adsense or hosts will give the infringer your name when they notify them that a complaint was filed and they removed them from search, killed their adsense income or booted them off of the server.

Good luck.

(The above contains information about legal matters and I am not an attorney.  I warned you that you need advice from an attorney so that you know if these people are really infringing or if they are using your content under fair use.  If you do any of the things listed above they could get an attorney who will try to sue your pants off.  If you file DMCAs that are unmerited Google might provide free legal assistance or friends of the court support to the target of your DMCAs.   You are dead meat of that happens.)

[RetBit]

Extremely thorough and insightful response. I hadn't thought of some of these other avenues. If nothing else, this gives us new things to try, and new reason to be hopeful.

THANK YOU!

[EGOL]

Glad to help.  It makes me really mad when people steal content.

I forgot to add that your competitors might become your ally in this type of fight.  I have an Indian competitor, a really smart and hard-to-beat company for the past decade, who joined me in fighting these infringers.  If you can get another company in your niche to complain about the same websites, I think that will have a good impact.  Never hurts to have friends in India. 

[ThompsonPaul]

To extend EGOL's excellent advice... these guys are using totally automated methods to scrape and post your content. So to fight back, you're also going to need to effectively automate as much of your discovery and takedown process as possible. You'll never beat enough of their automated volume processes with your own resource-intensive (i.e. fully manual) responses.

Good luck - I hate these assclowns with a fiery passion too. (Former pro photographer here.)

Paul