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by colejohnson66 1258 days ago
In those cases, you can send one to DDG and Bing, which are in the US. It won’t affect the actual website or other search engines, but it’s better than nothing.
2 comments

Indeed you can. I've had similar issues before (a site scraping content, though apparently from dev.to instead of my own domain and a YouTube channel making a 'video' with text and TTS from a post).

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.

Ianal, but I think ddg could come back and claim that their service doesn't copy the content or that their abstract is fair use, so a dmca wouldn't apply to them.

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.

IANAL either, but the DMCA has been used (by the RIAA, MPAA, and friends) to takedown pirate content on Google. I’d assume the same arguments would apply here. It can’t hurt to try.
Linking to a site that infringes copyrights may make the linker liable on the grounds that they are committing contributory copyright infringement. It's cheaper for search engines to delist sites than fight that battle--particularly if their corporate masters also rely on licensing media for distribution themselves.
IANAL but could this be what the spam site has done to get OP delisted?