If a scraper site, a site that steals your content and posts it almost identically on their own domain with no value add, outranks you, then that is something you might want to tell Google about.
John Mueller responded to such a complaint saying that you should tell him about the details, the queries and URLs that trigger this and he will investigate it.
John Mueller in the Google Hangout on Google+ recently said at the 20:20 mark that if this is happening to you, that "sounds like something we might want to pass on to the engineering team." So he said send him "some information on Google+, for example, with queries, with URLs" and he will pass it along.
The question was:
Scraper sites rank above me with my own content since January. Does my domain have irreversible quality issues? Even my 8 years old (updated) pages are outranked by other sites. They are exact copies with tons of ad banners, no extras. Is this permanent?
John Mueller's response:
That sounds like something we might want to pass on to the engineering team.So if you're listening. If you can send me some information on Google+, for example, with queries, with URLs, then that might be useful to pass on. So that we can take a look and see if that's working as expected or something weird is happening on our side.
October of last year, Gary Illyes from Google said that this typically happens when the site that content is being stolen from has a search quality issue or penalty. John Mueller did not address that point, which makes sense based on how John answers these types of questions.
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at Google+.
