Step One: Send This Email
Send this email to info@archive.org with the subject “DMCA Take Down Notice”
The sections in BOLD are the bits you need to customise with your own details.
Hello
I am the owner of domain name and website “yourwebsiteaddress.com”
I request you to remove the following links from your website
http://web.archive.org/web/2018*/yourwebsiteaddress.com
http://web.archive.org/web/2019*/yourwebsiteaddress.com
NOTE what I’m doing with the year. To make it easy for them, I’m listing out the URL for each year for which they are holding data.
You can see the years easily by looking at the black bar on top of the page. Every year that has black columns in it is a year for which they have taken a snapshot.
My Address:
Add your address here as it appears on your domain records
Phone No:
Add your phone number as it appears on your domain records
Email Address :
Add your email address. Make it easy for them by making it an email associated with your domain eg name@yourwebsiteaddress.com
I have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
The above information in this notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, I am the owner of the copyright interest involved.
Kind regards,
Your Name
Step Two: Amend Your Robots.txt file
Now you need to tell the Wayback Machine robot that you don’t want it looking at your site in future.
Add this to your robots file:
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
The robots file is a .txt document that you add to the root of your domain.
Open notepad and write the above two lines
Save the document as robots.txt
Upload this robots.txt file to the root directory of your site. For example, if your domain is www.mywebsite.com, you will place the file at www.mywebsite.com/robots.txt.
It took them a week to confirm my website was being submitted for exclusion and when I checked two days later, it was gone.
The Internet Archive is a useful resource and I enjoy using it. As with all things, moderation is key. Everything you do doesn’t have to exist for public consumption at all times.