At Google Dance Tokyo, Gary Illyes was asked about scraper sites during the Q&A.  He was specifically asked whether a site owner should be concerned about their site being scraped and republished, and all their internal links in the site were turned into external links from the scraper site pointing to the original site.

You can also ignore links from scraper sites. In general, we don’t take manual action on you due to those kinds of links.

Of course, if you are needing to disavow because you are impacted by bad links, I recommend erring on the side of caution and disavowing these links anyway.  For a healthy site, scraper sites aren’t going to hurt, but if a site is dealing with link issues already, being proactive and disavowing all low quality links, whether scraper sites or other low quality sites, makes sense.

For manual action link penalties specifically, Google wants to see a good portion of the bad links either removed or disavowed, and while scraper sites alone wouldn’t trigger it, it could possibly contribute when a site has bought links or obtained artificial links, so again, it is definitely worth removing/disavowing those scraper sites as well.

And of course, there is the “in general” reference, which leaves the door open to scraper sites potentially being a problem for link reasons.

It also raises the question about relative or absolute links – if a site used relative links and the scraper scraped the source code, those relative links wouldn’t magically turn into absolute links that would link back to the original site.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but if you are a site owner suddenly noticing scraper sites linking to you, for the most part, you don’t need to worry.

Thank you to Kenichi Suzuki, a Google Top Contributor in Japan and popular SEO blogger, for translating the Google Dance Q&A for The SEM Post.  We will have his full Google Dance Q&A report tomorrow.