VP of Audience at CNET ✽ Formerly Vimeo, Paramount and Visa ✽ Endlessly curious and obsessed with optimizing sites for bots and humans.
This is just a new iteration of content spinning. Publishers aren't powerless and they shouldn't solely rely on Google to solve this issue for them. Sites that translate and rewrite content almost always use automation. The most common method I've seen are pings to an RSS feed every minute. Once the site detects new content, they copy, translate, and publish it as their own. If you can determine the IPs from access logs, you can block the IPs, and in some cases the entire Autonomous System Number (ASN) provider if it's complicit, and that will disable them (at least temporarily). I've done this before using Cloudflare, and it immediately stopped it.
Good points! Can be useful to be proactive. I block millions of IP address blocks culled from the ASN. On others I use Wordfence to block by user agent which can be useful for rogue bots that cycle through IP addresses. An easy win with Wordfence is to block really old & outdated browser versions. There's a way to add a custom rule with wild cards, for example, to block the entire Chrome 20 - 29 versions with a single line. Then 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. 😁