CANONICAL NEGATIVE SEO https://anythingseo.word press.com/2018/04/23/c anonical-negative-seo/
Bill Hartzer of Hartzer Consulting has discovered a new negative SEO attack method. Google remains silent on their plans regarding this issue. Please note that this exploit is not yet tested and verified, only observed.
How was the negative SEO attack discovered? A client approached Hartzer because of a sudden rank drop. While reviewing the backlinks through Majestic, Hartzer discovered links to a strange site. Apparently, the client did not link to this site. He further investigated which led him to the negative SEO site. Since the attacking site linked out to another poor site, the sites they are linking to show up as links to the victim’s site. The discovered negative SEO attack is a cross-site canonical attack.
What is the canonical negative SEO? Let us first define what negative SEO is. Moz describes negative SEO as an “attempt to lower a site’s rankings in the search engines”. Negative SEO is a black hat and unethical practice. It manipulates search engines to penalise the victim’s site. We will discuss more on the different types of negative SEO on another article. For now, let us focus on the canonical negative SEO. According to Search Engine Journal, the canonical negative SEO is an attack that copies the entire head section of the victim’s web page in the section of the spam webpage, along with the canonical tag. Since the canonical tag tells Google the spam page is the victim’s page, Google will then assign all content and negative scores from the spam page to the victim. This attack is based on Google’s algorithm weakness which transfers positive or negative variables between the attacker and the victim. Conclusion The new canonical negative SEO attack is not yet confirmed, so only a few have discussed the topic. Several sites have already reported this attack, but there have been no experiments that confirm its possibility. If it is real, there will be implications in using the canonical tag. For now, I would recommend using Majestic to identify some of the attacking sites to figure out if your site is also a victim of this attack. SEO professionals should be vigilant in different negative SEO attacks to protect the ranking of their site. NOMADIC | 24