What should you do when another site copies your content like this then?
Have we gotten to the point where websites (and their content) need to be verified like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok do for personal accounts?
If so, will search engines be the ones verifying - using this as a new revenue scheme (with the dangers inherent in this... ie; pay to be listed or ranked higher)?
Bing is the problem. It's broken.
> "Thank you for your patience during our investigation. After further review, it appears that your site did not meet the standards set by Bing to remain indexed the last time it was crawled. To ensure that this was not a false flag, I also escalated the issue to our Product Team and they manually reviewed your site and confirmed that it is in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines detailed here:
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/webmaster-guidelines-30f....
We are not able to provide specifics for these types of issues but we recommend that you review our Webmaster Guidelines, especially the section Things to Avoid, and thoroughly check your site for any deliberately or accidentally employed SEO techniques that may have adversely affected your standing in Bing and Bing-powered search results."
Before snarking, please check that link and the long lists of things - I did not find to find my website https://linmob.net to be offending their "things to avoid list".
That was a reply to my first ticket requesting re-indexation, later tickets only got what I would call "non-replies".
The more sophisticated and popular the copycat site is (scraping from a distributed network, stripping most HTML tags, etc.), the harder it becomes, and the only thing is to contact the search and hope they can manually mark your domain as the authoritative one. Your success may vary according to your popularity/importance.
That would almost certainly be regarded as a "doorway page"[1], resulting in you getting manually ranked downward or even deindexed entirely.
[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
I'm talking about, if content on legitimatesite.com includes JavaScript that detects if it's being loaded on any other domain, then erase the entire article's HTML from the DOM.
Obviously this is easily defeated by stripping out JavaScript, so it's useful only for very primitive mirroring.
If that happens I'd use language about the exclusive "public display" right that you have over your work.
I'm not aware of this claim being used for a dmca, but I'd like to see how such a claim turned out.
In the first case, I sent a DMCA to Google & Bing as well as to Cloudflare. Cloudflare responds by giving the name of the actual host, and I sent another DMCA to that host (they were US based, otherwise YMMV). The content was delisted (not the site, even though it was made up entirely of verbatim scraped content) from search engines and from the site.
Bottom line is you can send a DMCA notice to search engines and it appears to be effective. Actually, in case search engines demote sites like this in some way, I would send the DMCA notice to search engines _first_, because if the content gets removed from the original site they may not be able to verify the duplicate content.