In October we merged a site into PlayerAssist. About 9 days after the merge On October 21st, there was a large drop in traffic. We just figured it was Google re-processing some data while it was comprehending the sites merging together. Then it regained a bit and dropped off to its lowest point in mid-November.
Again, in my mind, I’m just chalking this up to Google not knowing how to deal with 2 sites merging together, and thinking it will get fixed with the next algorithm update. It is not ideal as it has probably cost us many thousands of dollars in revenue at this point.
Yesterday, we were notified by a partner to check Google for DMCA complaints. I do so, and low and behold, what appears to be two fictitious entities/sites appear to have basically submitted every URL on our website. Check it out here
I received no notification in Webmaster Tools, no email.
It even says in Webmaster Tools all 4k+ of our URLs are indexed:
However, during this whole time, when I search on Google itself:
I just thought Google was confused by the site merge and didn’t know what to do with the site yet. You know Google, sometimes it takes them a bit to work all this out. So I never really investigated.
Unfortunately, if I had simply scrolled to the bottom of the search results, I would’ve seen this:
The best part is, both sites filing the “complaints” don’t even exist. Maybe they did at one point? I have no clue. I’m assuming they spun up a clone of our website to initiate the DMCA complaint and get our site removed. I don’t know.
I just filed the counter-claim DMCA late last evening just listing my main domain as the URL. But, apparently, I have to submit each URL individually. There is no mass import. I have to click a + button and copy and paste each URL. This process is insane. I found another report of this happening to someone else. Funnily enough, the complainant used the same entity name(info-bloom). It took him over 15 hours to submit all 3,000 URLs. We have over 4,000 to submit.
Also, I don’t know if the reputation of the site in Google’s eye may have been damaged since it took us so long to even find this. It is VERY frustrating someone got basically our entire site delisted, cost us revenue, and we have no recourse other than to file a DMCA counter-claim that seems like it will take ~20 hours. Is there a better solution? Surely there’s got to be a better way to deal with a claim like this.
