We’ve heard of Google ranking copied scraped content before and even getting the canonical wrong. But here is a clear night and day example of a site that copied another site completely, with the logo and everything but the URLs and Google Search thought the copied site is the original site.
Adarsh Verma shared this example on Twitter and Danny Sullivan of Google confirmed receiving it and said he will “pass it on” to the Google Search team.
Here is the screen shot in Google Search Console where the URL Inspection Tool shows a URL on fossbytes.com saying is canonicalized to animajav.us:
Click to enlarge it, here is the specific URL on fossbytes.com and here is the URL on animajav.us. Heck, animajav.us even has the fossbytes.com logo on the site, it is a mirror copy:
Fossbytes.com was registered 2014 and this mirror site was registered less than a year ago.
Neither site ranks for me in Google Search anyway – but either way, there is no way Google Search Console should show this.
What am I missing?
It is unclear if this is a wider spread issue like we had with the canonical bugs from 2020.
Forum discussion at Twitter.