Canonical Thieves

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  CK Stull: Hi guys! Been a while since I posted here.
  
  I have a question about canonical thieves...
  
  I have a post that has always ranked really well. Last week I noticed my traffic waning.
  
  Eventually I went searching for the problem and found that another website has basically stolen my canonical tag.
  
  When I was I was trying to fix this, I noticed a website with my exact title and description in the SERPs.
  
  I clicked on it and my blog post opened up. But only for a second. Then another website with a spammy capture page opened up on top of it.
  
  To me, it looks like they’ve stolen my rel=canoncial tag (I can see it when I “view source" on their page) and they’re also using some sort of iFrame or something.
  
  Have you guys ever heard of this happening?
  
  I’ve got a complaint in with Google, and I’ve contacted hostgator (their host) but everyone seems to be taking their sweet time.
  
  I’ve also tried making changes to the page content, and I’ve even unpublished it now. Nothing changes though.
  
  What can I do?
  
  (I can post links if it helps)
  
• 
  Rod Farrell: Sounds more like you have malware in your website
  
• 
  Gaurav Kumar: hacking issue to change your login credential immediately and check links and security algos applied
  
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  Neeraj Pandey: Here what does it mean stolen my canonical tag? This is a signal for Google not directive so it means Google takes a judgement call seeing both pages and if not OK then doesn't follow it. For duplicate content again I will say that if your post was driving traffic and he copied it Google knows who stealing whose content 
• 
  Tim Capper: I would also DMCA the other site for good measure.
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  Jim Munro: Hi +CK Stull ;, please post the link to your site.
• 
  CK Stull: Thanks for all the responses everyone. Just wanted to let you all know that google has finally taken action and given my rankings back. However, the other site is still using the canonical tag. I guess I'm not too concerned about it, since they aren't getting anything from it. Here's the links though, if you'd like to see what they're doing.
  
  I have a dmca in with the registrar, the host (host gator) and Google. I'm hoping hostgator will eventually act on it.
  
  Here's my post: epicintrovert . com/how-to-find-high-paying-freelance-writing-jobs-for-beginners
  
  Here's the other: theoriginalpicklecompany . com.au/work/online-writing-jobs-beginners/