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[Help/Advice] A spam domain is reverse-proxying my startup's website, and Google set the clone as the Canonical URL. How do I kill it?

Hi everyone, I’m dealing with an absolute SEO nightmare right now and could really use some advice from the sysadmin/SEO veterans here.

A while ago, I launched my project,Nobella.app(an AI translation tool/platform), and we’ve been working hard on growing our organic traffic.

Recently, I noticed my traffic tanking. I checked Google Search Console and discovered that a sketchy domain (olxlibre.com) has set up a perfect reverse proxy of my website. Whenever I update text on my site, it updates on theirs instantly.

The absolute worst part: Google has been fooled and marked the scam domain as the Canonical URL, ignoring my real site.

Here is what I have done so far:

  • JS Redirect: I implemented a JavaScript snippet (if window.location.hostname !==...) to redirect users back to my real domain. This successfully catches human visitors who land on the clone. However, because it's strictly client-side, the clone's sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and the raw HTML served to Googlebot remain completely unaffected.
  • Absolute Canonicals: I updated all my <link rel="canonical"> tags to be absolute (https://nobella.app/page) instead of relative, hoping Googlebot picks up the change on its next crawl.
  • DMCA Takedown: I filed a DMCA copyright removal request directly through Google’s dashboard.
  • Disavow Tool: I submitted a disavow file for the scam domain.

The hurdle I'm facing: I know I need to block their server IP so they get a 403 Forbidden or 500 Error when trying to scrape my content, but they are hiding behind Cloudflare/Gname, making it hard to pinpoint their origin IP.

My questions for the community:

  1. Has anyone successfully fought off a reverse-proxy clone like this?
  2. What is the best way to block them at the server/WAF level if they rotate IPs or use Cloudflare? (Should I block the specific Host header via .htaccess or Cloudflare WAF?)
  3. Once I manage to break their mirror, how long does Google usually take to restore the canonical status to my original domain?

Any insights would be hugely appreciated. Watching your hard work get cloned and steal your rankings is incredibly frustrating. Thanks in advance!

submitted by /u/mls_dev
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/EhW8lA3
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