(Entry was posted by Andrew Knowles on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/14/2014).

I have a question about the canonical tag

I have a question about the canonical tag. I have a client who blogs in detail on a specialist subject. The content is not duplicated but they are concerned about other sites copying their content and thereby devaluing their SEO. Should they consider implementing the canonical tag to protect against this? Thanks.?

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Andrew Knowles: I have a question about the canonical tag. I have a client who blogs in detail on a specialist subject. The content is not duplicated but they are concerned about other sites copying their content and thereby devaluing their SEO. Should they consider implementing the canonical tag to protect against this? Thanks.
Edwin Jonk: Yes rel canonical can help against scrapers. However some do strip out things like rel canonical. So you might also want to use rel author, where at least you get the credit.
Tony McCreath: Try to make sure you get crawled before a scraper. E.g. GWT has the Fetch+Submit option.
Mark Alves: That's a misuse of the canonical tag and I can't imagine anything good coming from pointing to example.com/foo from a page of the same name. A better strategy would be to get your pages indexed as quickly as possible by using site maps, linking to the page and sharing it socially. If you find your page is scraped then submit a scraper complaint to Google https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6bp1SOVmy60QjkF0Y/viewform and file a DMCA takedown notice with the ISP that's hosting the scraped content.
Edwin Jonk: +Mark Alves ;rel canonical on the canonical page is pretty common and it doesn't hurt you nor is it a misuse as far as I know.
Mark Alves: Feels passive rather than going after scrapers directly, but if others have had success with the canonical tag getting scraped as well then that's a pretty good solution.