DMCA attacks on affiliate sites: real threat or temporary buzz?

Fake DMCA takedowns have turned into a negative SEO weapon in iGaming: one complaint can get an affiliate's ranking page de-indexed by Google. In this AffPapa live session, the moderator, an SEO handling DMCA recoveries, talks to Emma (director of publishing at Gentoo Media), Misha (chief business officer at SlotCatalog), SEO educator Sean and Daniel, who built the DMCA Boss tool.

In this episode

• Misha calls it a permanent asymmetry: filing a complaint costs nothing, while defending against it can cost weeks of work (15:02).

• The moderator puts a typical successful recovery at 12 to 24 hours, says Google's quoted 10 to 14 working days is not true and now sees months (19:43, 1:29:10).

• Sean expects it to get worse: some sites he works with are live for two days, down for one, again and again, and his team recovers around 500 URLs a week (38:16, 57:45).

• Misha says a written statement from the named rights holder that it did not file the claim could be the single strongest evidence behind an appeal (32:17).

• Tips: counters filed from non-work email addresses got faster responses, a Gmail account works best, and the question-mark counter link goes to the faster queue (51:10, 51:30, 51:57).

• On moving pages with a 301, Emma warns the complaint can follow you, so recovering the original URL is better if at all possible (1:14:37).

Webinar from iGaming Club by AffPapa Media, published on YouTube.