Aashish Sehrawat
Image credit: cloudwards
The widespread misuse of the DMCA is well-known. In the most recent update, Google removed over 3,000 WheelsJoint articles from its search results, including the Tesla market research post that was featured on Forbes, Teslarati, InsideEVs, and numerous other media outlets.
After receiving four DMCA claims from “info-bloom.site,” a website that does not exist, Google removed over 3,000 pages (almost all articles published on WheelsJoint.com) from its search engine.
DMCA notices:
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/25435288
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/25433591
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/25434275
https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/25440584
The notices are written in unprofessional language:
“Hi Our blog http://info-bloom.site/ has been completely copied by another site. All content and images were stolen and posted at https://www.wheelsjoint.com/. Below we provide all the urls of our site and the urls where the stolen content was posted. Please remove all content that violates our rights.”
The scammer may have temporarily mirrored the WheelsJoint website on his domain name and then taken it down once Google processed the DMCA notices and removed our website, according to WheelsJoint.
1&1 IONOS has registered and is hosting the domain “info-bloom.site.” WheelsJoint notified the service provider of the abuse, but has yet to receive a response.
The icing on the cake: Google has disabled ad serving.
Because WheelsJoint is a Google Adsense partner, Google has deactivated ad serving on all of the articles that have been deleted from the search engine, leaving the website without any revenue.
Counter notifications are tough to submit on Google.
It’s easier than you think to send Google DMCA takedown notices for thousands of URLs. You only need to fill out a DMCA form on Google’s website, and each notification can contain up to 1000 URLs. A text box on the form takes up to 1000 URLs at once.
If you want to file a counter-DMCA notice, however, you must do so one URL at a time. WheelsJoint spent nearly 15 hours submitting over 3,000 URLs, whereas the scammer would have only taken a few minutes.
According to WheelsJoint, they have been submitting counter notices to Google for three days and has yet to obtain a response.
Source: WheelsJoint