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🧭 A competitor can get your best page removed from Google without proving they own anything at all. Fake DMCA copyright takedowns are being used as a negative-SEO weapon, and Google is honoring them with no identity verification on the person filing. Barry Schwartz, writing for Search Engine Roundtable, reports that established publishers including Press Gazette, Search Engine Land, and Moz have had legitimate content wrongly pulled from the index. Restoring a wrongly removed URL can take two weeks or more, and longer when several claims target the same page. The real problem is the asymmetry. Filing a takedown is fast, anonymous, and costs the filer nothing. Fighting one is slow, falls entirely on the targeted site, and the traffic loss accrues the whole time the page sits deindexed. The system currently trusts the accuser over the publisher. This is a threat model, not a headline. Any site with rankings worth attacking is exposed, and a small publisher without a legal team or a fast escalation path is the most exposed of all. What to actually do: monitor your highest-value URLs for sudden deindexing, set alerts on their index status, keep proof of authorship for your key pages, and learn your DMCA counter-notice process before you are forced to use it under time pressure. Great rankings are worth defending. Right now the defense is mostly noticing fast. What is your take on this? 🤔💬 Want to stay ahead of the future of search? 🔔 Follow Search Shift for the daily signal on SEO, GEO, and AEO (trusted by 79,368 followers). 📬 Join 7,489 readers of our newsletter and get today's SEO and GEO moves decoded: https://lnkd.in/d7axEeXK