How to Remove Pirated Copies of Your Course from Google

It usually starts with a search you almost didn't run. You type your own course name into Google — maybe with "free download" added — and there it is: a pirate site ranking on page one, offering the course you spent months building for nothing. Sometimes it outranks your own sales page.

The good news: Google has a formal, free process for removing infringing URLs from its search results, and course creators use it successfully every day. The less-good news: most guides explain only half of the process, skip what happens after you click submit, and never mention the other search engines where those same links keep ranking. This guide covers all of it — how to remove a pirated course from Google's results, what happens after you submit, and where else you need to file. (One note before we start: this is practical guidance from people who file these requests for a living, not legal advice — for questions about your specific legal situation, talk to a lawyer.)

Delisting vs. Takedown at the Source

The first thing to understand: removing a link from Google and removing the pirated file are two different actions, aimed at two different companies. Delisting tells Google to stop showing specific URLs in its search results. A takedown at the source tells the site hosting the pirated copy — or its hosting provider — to remove the file itself.

Delisting is fast leverage. Google doesn't host the pirated course, but search is one of the main ways buyers find it, so cutting the listing cuts a major route to the stolen copy. The catch is that the file is still live: anyone with the direct link, anyone on Telegram, and anyone using a search engine you haven't filed with can still reach it.

A takedown at the source is the deeper fix — the file itself comes down — but it depends on the host cooperating, and dedicated piracy sites often ignore notices or re-upload within days. That's why serious enforcement almost always means both: delist the URL so buyers stop finding it today, and send a DMCA notice to the host so the copy disappears entirely. We walk through the host-level process in our guide to filing a DMCA takedown notice; this article focuses on the search-engine side, starting with Google delisting.

Filing Google's Copyright Removal: Step by Step

Google handles copyright complaints through its "Report Content for Legal Reasons"portal — the same intake point it uses for other legal removal requests. Here's the process from start to finish. (This guide is written for course creators, but the same Google flow applies to leaked premium content — we cover that side under creator content protection.)

Step 1: Gather your evidence before you open the form

You need two sets of URLs: the address of your original course(your sales page or the course's listing on Udemy, Teachable, Kajabi, Skool, or wherever it lives), and the exact URLs of the infringing pagesas they appear in Google's results. Click through from the search result and copy the full address — not the site's homepage. Screenshot each pirate page too; if the page changes or moves before review, your screenshots document what was there.

Step 2: Open the portal and pick the right product

Go to Google's Report Content for Legal Reasons page and sign in with a Google account — the form requires it, and the same account gives you the removals dashboard to track the request. When asked which Google product your complaint concerns, select Google Search. This matters: Google routes complaints by product, and picking the wrong one (say, Google Drive when the pirated file is hosted elsewhere and merely indexed in Search) sends your request to a queue that can't act on it. From there, follow the prompts for reporting copyright infringement.

Step 3: Complete every field like it will be scrutinized

Because it will be. A complete submission includes:

• Your contact information— name, email, and country. If you're filing on behalf of your company, say so.
• A description of the copyrighted work— e.g. "a paid online video course consisting of 42 lessons, sold at" followed by your URL. Be concrete about what the work is.
• An authorized example of the work — the URL where your course legitimately lives. This is how the reviewer confirms the pirate copy is actually yours.
• The infringing URLs — one exact URL per line. Every URL you list is evaluated individually, so precision here decides your approval rate.
• The sworn statements— a good-faith belief statement that the use isn't authorized by you or by law (licensees, affiliates, and resellers you forgot about are the classic trap for course creators), and a statement made under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and that you're the rights holder or authorized to act for them. These are legal declarations — knowingly making material misrepresentations in a notice can create liability under 17 U.S.C. §512(f) — which is exactly why this article isn't legal advice: if you're unsure whether you hold the rights you're asserting, check before you sign.
• Your signature — typing your full legal name counts.

Step 4: Submit and save the confirmation

After you submit, Google confirms receipt and the request enters review. Keep the confirmation — if you end up filing dozens of these, your paper trail is what keeps the campaign organized.

What Happens After You Submit (Including Lumen)

If your request is approved, Google removes the reported URLs from its search results. Three things about that outcome are worth understanding clearly.

First, removal applies to the URLs you listed — not to the pirate site as a whole, and not to future pages the site creates. If the same site re-uploads your course at a new address next week, that new URL needs its own report. This is the single biggest reason course piracy feels like whack-a-mole: the form removes specific addresses, and pirates generate new addresses cheaply.

Second, removal isn't always final.Google notifies the affected site's owner (through Search Console, if they use it), and the site can respond with a counter notification — if it does, Google may reinstate the URLs. Dedicated pirate sites rarely bother, but it's a possible outcome to know about.

Third — and this is the part almost no guide tells you — your notice becomes public. Google routinely forwards copies of the legal notices it receives to Lumen(lumendatabase.org), an independent research project at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center that collects and publishes content-removal requests. The text of your complaint, including the list of URLs you reported, becomes publicly searchable there; Lumen redacts certain personal contact details, but the substance of the notice is visible to anyone — including the pirates. Google also typically places a notice at the bottom of affected search results indicating that results were removed in response to a legal complaint, with a link to the Lumen record.

Timelines, Rejections, and Resubmitting

Google publishes no guaranteed turnaround, and anyone quoting you an exact number is guessing. In practice, clear-cut requests — obvious pirate page, clean URL list, original work easy to verify — are often processed within days. Ambiguous ones take longer, and some come back with a request for more information. You can watch each URL's status in the removals dashboard tied to the account you filed from.

Not every URL gets removed. When Google declines to act on a URL, it states a reason, and the reason tells you what to fix:

• The URL is dead or redirects. Pirate pages move constantly. Re-run the search, find the current address, and file that instead.
• The connection to your work isn't clear.If the reviewer can't see, from your description and authorized URL, that the reported page copies yourcourse, they won't remove it. Tighten the description; name specific lesson titles the pirate listing reproduces.
• The request is incomplete or too broad.Homepage URLs, missing statements, or "remove this whole site" requests don't clear the bar. One page, one URL, every field filled.

A "we did not remove" outcome is not a ruling that your copyright claim is wrong — it's a decision about that submission. Fix the stated problem and resubmit as a new request. In our experience, corrected resubmissions frequently succeed where the first attempt was declined — a rejection is feedback on the submission, not the claim.

Don't Stop at Google: Bing, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo

The same pirate pages you just delisted from Google usually keep ranking on Bing, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo. That's the gap in almost every guide on this topic: Google is not the only place your students-to-be are searching — and pirates benefit from the fact that many creators never file anywhere but Google, and plenty of enforcement efforts stop there too.

• Binghas its own copyright infringement reporting form, operated by Microsoft. The required elements are similar to Google's — identify your work, list exact URLs, sign the statements — but it's a separate filing with its own queue. A Google removal does nothing to Bing's index.
• Yandex— Russia's dominant search engine, and heavily used by the audiences many piracy sites serve — accepts copyright complaints through its own channels, with a wrinkle: Yandex's stated policy for regular web results pushes you toward the site's host first — once the source page comes down, the search listing follows — with complaint forms for pages that linger in results and for content on Yandex's own services. Expect a less streamlined experience than Google's form and, in our experience, slower and less predictable handling. It's still worth filing: piracy links that survive nowhere else often survive on Yandex precisely because few rights holders ever file there.
• DuckDuckGo is the interesting one: its traditional link results come primarily from Bing, which means a successful Bing removal generally propagates to DuckDuckGo without a separate filing. If a pirated course link shows on DuckDuckGo, the practical fix is usually to get it out of Bing.

This is the core of how we think about search engine delisting at DMCA Masters: coverage across all four engines, not just the one with the famous form. A delisting campaign that stops at Google leaves the side doors wide open.

Pirates don't rely on Google out of loyalty — they rely on whatever index still lists them. Delist them from one engine and their traffic doesn't die; it migrates.

When Manual Filing Stops Scaling

For a single leak — one pirate page, one course — the process above is absolutely worth doing yourself. It costs nothing but some time and patience. The calculation changes when the piracy is sustained:

• Dozens of URLs across rotating domains. Established piracy operations run mirror domains and swap them as takedowns land. Every rotation resets your work: new searches, new URL lists, new filings across four engines.
• Re-uploads outpacing your filings. If a new copy appears faster than your last removal clears review, manual filing is treading water.
• Multiple layers per link. Each pirate listing typically has a search result to delist, a listing page to take down, and a file host behind it — three separate actions per copy of your course.
• Your time is the real cost. Hours spent hunting URLs and re-filing forms are hours not spent making the course better or selling it.

That's the point where a managed service makes sense — one that monitors for new uploads continuously, files across Google, Bing, and Yandex (and lets Bing handle DuckDuckGo), pursues the hosts and the file-storage layer behind the listings, and has human investigators following up on the requests that bounce instead of firing notices into the void. That end-to-end approach is what our course piracy protection service does for course creators, online educators, and premium content creators whose work keeps getting re-uploaded.

Key Takeaways

• Delisting removes the search result; a takedown at the source removes the file. Sustained piracy usually requires both.
• File through Google's Report Content for Legal Reasons portal, select Google Search as the product, and list exact infringing URLs — approval is per-URL, so precision decides your hit rate.
• Your notice becomes public on the Lumen database. Write it accordingly, and don't put anything in free-text fields you wouldn't want the pirates to read.
• "We did not remove" is feedback, not a verdict. Fix the stated reason — dead URL, unclear ownership, missing detail — and resubmit.
• Bing and Yandex need their own filings; DuckDuckGo's results draw heavily on Bing, so Bing removals generally cover it. Stopping at Google leaves the side doors open.
• When URLs multiply across rotating domains faster than you can file, that's the signal to hand enforcement to a service built for volume.