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Few things... make sure you have a sitemap that is always upto date and submitted to search engines - this will encourage them to view your content first and recognise it as belonging to your domain. In addition to this put links in your content to other parts of your site, if it gets scraped it will probably be with the links in it and so anyone actually wanting real content can get through. If there are thousands from the same domain coming to your site, disavow the base url and also report that url for spam (it's your copyright). In fact if you notice a small site scraping you, do that after you've tried to contact them. If this still doesn't stop them look at your logs and see where their crawlers are coming from and block their IP's. On one of my old site I blocked the whole of China at one point because it was constantly being barraged by scrapers and people trying to guess account passwords. Hope that helps

With respect to local search, Google is providing the most relevant search results relative to location. SO, when considering optimizing for local vs organic, wouldn’t the correct answer be that it depends on the type of business? For example, in a moderately sized metro area like Concord, California, a sandwich shop should weigh heavily in favor of doing everything they can to rank locally because Google will serve up the most local results when people are looking for a sandwich shop (in the immediate area). A law firm, however, certainly wants clients who are close to their office, BUT they can also take clients throughout the city. So if they are optimized for local search, at the expense of organic, wouldn’t they be losing out all of the other prospective clients who search outside of the “local” (immediate) area that Google deems close to the law office? Very few will drive across Concord to get a sandwich (unless it’s Togo’s….I LOVE Togo’s! ;-), but many will make the drive for an attorney if they feel that attorney is the best fit for their complex legal matter. I have been holding off doing local search optimization for this reason for my law firm clients. They rank very strong for vanity searches, while the “7 pack” are underneath, competing with each other all bundled together. Plus, as I suspect and hopefully someone can confirm, as with the example above, my clients show strong wherever the searcher’s location is throughout Concord, and the others (7 pack) show in the immediate proximity of where the inquiry was made. Is that a fair /correct statement?

Hello, Over the years I've had a few sights hacked.  I tried changing the login details however the hacker seemed to be able to access it again. In solving this issue, I changed web hosting companies immediately, and after that my site was ranking well again. Hope this helps.