Site Scraping and Canonical Tags

[APFM]

Hi,

So I recently found a site (actually just one page) that has scraped my homepage.  All the links to my site have been removed except the canonical tag, should this be disavowed through WMT or reported through WMT's Spam Report?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

Content scraping is a very common thing and fortunately, with the rel=canonical tag still pointing to your domain, there is nothing to worry from content duplication point of view and with this tag intact, their content will not make it  to Google's index. You don't need to worry about the other website out-ranking you and you don't have to use disavow here as it is for spammy backlinks and not for rel=canonical tags. However, you can approach those guys and ask them to take it down immediately and you can file a DRM or DMCA case against them if they don't agree to take the content down. You can also report the matter to Google here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi