DMCA

Hello,

I have encountered a rather unique problem with my new website, and I'm at a loss as to what I can do 😞

For quick context, I'm very new to Squarespace and website building in general, so I've been learning a lot of the basics as I go over the past couple months. In 2024 I bought a domain for my sport club, and agreed to build them a new website (https://www.blackboar.co.uk/). I have recently published the site, and was waiting for it to be indexed and appear on Google search results. All seemed to be fine, but today, I discovered that Google wasn't showing the site in the search results due to a DMCA strike.

After copious research this evening, and consulting the Lumen Database, it seems the copyright strike occured in December 2013, presumably when my domain was owned by someone else.

There's little information I can find about what I can do in this situation - basically, the domain I bought in 2023 must have been previously owned by another individual or company years ago, and they received a DMCA strike which they didn't resolve. Now that I'm the owner of the domain, my new site is delisted from Google search - most annoyingly of all, the Lumen entry lists the homepage for the DMCA strike rather than a specific site page - and from my understanding of things, I have no way of rectifying this historic copyright strike, justified or otherwise, as I don't have any details from 10 years ago when the DMCA was originally filed.

Sorry if there's an obvious answer to this, or if it's been asked in a previous forum post. As I say, I'm very new to all this, and had no idea I should check for historical DMCA strikes against domains before purchasing them - I naively assumed that by buying the available domain through Squarespace, there wouldn't be any issues.

This forum has been a wealth of knowledge and support over recent weeks as I built my site, so I hoped someone might have more insight into this specific issue I'm facing, and whether there's anything I can do as the new domain owner to remove the DMCA strike and have the site reappear on Google search, or if I'm out of luck.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice that can be offered.

F