Publishers whose content is copied by thousands of sites have it removed from Google through the DMCA process. The person asked Google’s John Mueller whether the uniqueness of content matters, and if not, does it mean that fighting content theft is a waste of time.
Mass content theft and ranking
The person asking this question implies that their rankings are not that good. This means that one reason for poor rankings has to do with the duplication of their content on thousands of other sites.
However, once they removed thousands of sites that copied their content, site rankings didn’t improve.
The legal process for removing content is through a US law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
What is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
The DMCA provides a legal remedy that allows companies like Google to avoid prosecution for publishing content stolen from others, as long as they provide the original content publisher with a way to request removal of the content.
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DMCA takedown requests provide a way for publishers to ask Google to take down content stolen from them.
Google will next send the infringing party a notice of the complaint and give them the opportunity to dispute the claim.
If the alleged infringing party chooses to contest the claim, the person filing the DMCA must submit it to the court.
Filing a DMCA is not a simple matter, it is a very serious legal process and publishers should consider seeking the advice of an attorney to learn more about the DMCA process if this is something they are considering filing.
Is protecting content from theft worth it?
Here is the problem:
“Every article on my site begins with a specific phrase. Googling this exact phrase, I found 3,000 portals that stole my content, and within six months I passed the DMCA to They are all removed from Google’s index.
I’m doing fine, but this has no effect on my post.
So the question arises: Wouldn’t a significant increase in the overall uniqueness of a site’s content affect its ranking and visibility in search results?
Isn’t that worth the effort to fight content theft? “
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Uniqueness of content and ranking
John Mueller focused his answer on the question of whether the uniqueness of content affects rankings.
Mueller replied:
“As far as I know, there is no aspect in our algorithm that says, oh, this is something that is very unique to this site and will, because there is something very unique here, we’re going to rank it higher on various other queries. high.
So if you’re selling, I don’t know… a unique shoe type and someone is searching for shoes, we won’t rank your site because it’s a unique shoe type, but you There are shoes, this person is looking for shoes, and maybe other sites have shoes too, and we’ll rank them based on what we find there.
So it’s not that we’re going to go through and say, well, there’s something really unique here, so we should rank it higher for this generic term. “
Is it worth submitting a DMCA?
Mueller went on to answer part of the question about whether filing a DMCA was worthwhile.
He commented:
“Obviously, if you have something unique and someone is looking for that unique thing, it’s like we’re going to try to showcase your site there.
It’s also the reason for things like the DMCA complaint process, you can say it well, other people are ranking my unique things and I don’t want them to show up because that’s my content, or I own the copyright to it at least .
For this, the process makes sense.
But for a generic case where someone is searching for something generic and you have unique things that also map to that generic category, I don’t think we’d rank your page higher just because they’re unique things.
So I think if you see other sites ranking for something specific to you, something unique that you have on your site, and you own the copyright to your content, and anything else you can use the DMCA process for for that, This is a really good tool to help clean it up.
But it’s not because we see something unique on your site that we’ll rank your site higher. “
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Unique content and ranking
The person asking the question apparently googled a unique phrase included in the content. They believed that copied content would negatively impact their rankings, but once the content was removed, rankings did not improve.
This is a problem if another site is actually overtaking your site with an exact copy of your entire web page. However, if thousands of sites are copying content and not ranking well, then this may not be a problem related to poor rankings.
The problem is elsewhere.
Sometimes we look for reasons why rankings shouldn’t be there. But the reason isn’t always something weird, like stolen content or really bad links.
It may be that the content or website quality may need improvement, or the website may need better promotion.
Citation
Why filing 3,000 DMCAs didn’t improve rankings
Watch at 43:15 minutes:
