My first DMCA or is it Fake?
'Following is an official DMCA and trademark violation complaint, about pages of
bb-articles.com (and any other article sites that you own or control), on behalf of
.........................'
The sender claims
'I. We have not authorized the submitter (i.e., "............," "..............," or other usernames) to use our name, URL, or trademark(s).
II. The submitter (i.e., "...................," "....................," or other usernames) was
paid by a direct competitor to post hundreds of duplicated articles (with links to
our site) so that our site will be penalized by Google. The violator was unaware
that he was being used to commit the crime. We do not hold him responsible. He has
already agreed to stop submitting additional articles, but existing articles/pages
must be removed.'
If I had been sent an email from the authors asking me to remove the articles, links or make changes I would do so no problem and they wouldn't need a DMCA. But this email doesn't sit right with me.
If it's genuine it will have been sent out to a lot of article directories, but the articles in question were submitted in 2009 and there has been no activity that I'm aware of from those authors or pen names since then and the domain would have benefited from the article marketing..
It doesn't make sense to me because if somebody wanted to harm your business by getting lots of backlinks they would just pay a backlinking service not pay extra for articles written too. If in the unlikely event Google were to penalize the domain linked to it would have happened in 2009 not now, and as I pointed out in my return email the domain would be more likely to suffer now if there was a sudden big drop in backlinks if they are contacting a lot of directories.
So the 2 scenarios that I can think of is that either the site owner is panicking because of Googles shake up or somebody has faked the DMCA to lose their competitor a lot of backlinks in a short time and I don't want to play a part in that.
I've tried to use the contact form on the domain in question to verify the email but it isn't working. Next I will try to contact the authors and ask them about it. I may end up removing the links but what I won't do is remove the articles because unless the DMCA sender is lying they don't belong to him they belong to whoever paid for them.
Has anybody else experienced something like this?
Canadian Expat Living in Medellin, Colombia
Canadian Expat Living in Medellin, Colombia
Canadian Expat Living in Medellin, Colombia
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