I recently wrote about the new canonical negative SEO discovered by Bill Hartzer of Hartzer Consulting. It is a way of redirecting penalty from one site to another. To recall, Hartzer states that the new canonical negative SEO works in three steps: first, the negative SEO site copies the head of the victim site on its own. Second, the negative site then uses the canonical tag to point it to the victim site. Lastly, Google will then assign all content and negative scores from the spam page to the victim site. As a result, the victim site will get hurt. Google’s algorithm weakness which transfers positive or negative variables between the attacker and the victim is the basis of this attack.
However, according to Search Engine Roundtable, this “new undetectable negative SEO tactic” does not work. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, clarified in a tweet that this is not how canonicals work -they do not combine signals.
How do canonicals work?
In the twitter thread, John Mueller further explains how canonicals work.
When Google sees different pages with similar content, it will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that. Google will then consider the other similar pages as duplicates and crawl it less often.
The rel=canonical tag is a way to tell Google that one URL is equal to another URL for search purposes. It prevents duplicate content issues by specifying which is the canonical or preferred version of the page. By choosing a canonical page in a set of duplicate pages, you can:
- choose the URL you want people to see in search results
- consolidate link signals for duplicate pages
- simplify tracking metrics for a specific piece of content
- consolidate page ranking to your preferred URL
- avoid spending crawl time on duplicate pages
Conclusion
Negative SEO has been around for some time. These malicious attempts to lower the ranking of a victim’s site in search engines is unethical. Many, like Hartzer, are vigilant in keeping up with the latest news and updates on negative SEO to protect sites from such attacks. By being vigilant and reporting observations, tests, and experiments, we can confirm what works and what does not. It can improve your SEO efforts. It can also make the internet a safer place for all of us.
Anything SEO 