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Hi Andrew, Re. your comment: My main concern is that in the eyes of Google I'd be stripping a lot of content off the domain all at once, and then replacing it with these shell pages containing nothing (in terms of SEO) but meta, a headline, navigation links, and an iFrame. ... you are right to be concerned about this. It is going to look, as you say, like a very thin page with no value-add for anyone visiting, or Google. If the pages served no real purpose to Google, you could always robots them out, but what is being suggested isn't a particularly good idea if you are still wanting them to rank in the SERPs. -Andy

Don't second-guess on that myth that scrapers can't hurt you.  These guys are outranking you right now with your own content.  Proof enough to me that Kissmetrics needs to take notice and pull down false information.  Also, this is another clear example of Google not knowing how poorly their systsem is working and they know not that they know not. Google would not be getting millions of DMCAs per week if they were right about this.  I've sent them hundreds.

That's great advice, and I will definitely be referencing the Beginner's Guide. I have lots of thoughts on this topic, so I appreciate the help prioritizing what I write.

As a followup to the above, do you have any thoughts on exactly how significant a factor server location is today? I know https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#2 says that it is not a "definitive signal." However, I'm at a point where IT needs to be convinced a CDN would be worth the investment, so I'm looking for a way to quantify the SEO impact of the server being hosted outside the country of your target audience - which I haven't been able to do yet. Has anyone seen any case studies/quantifiable info about this online? I know it's difficult to put numbers to a single ranking factor's impact. Additionally, for geotargeting in the Search Console, today over 60% of the .com traffic is from English speakers in the U.S. We use hreflang tags, but even so, a little over 30% of the traffic is non-U.S., so I would expect geotargeting our subdirectory for the U.S. audience specifically could have a negative impact on the non-U.S. traffic. Thoughts?