{"id":28564,"date":"2011-05-20T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/2011\/05\/20\/hacked-canonical-tags-coming-soon-to-a-website-near-you\/"},"modified":"2019-04-23T09:30:05","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T09:30:05","slug":"hacked-canonical-tags-coming-soon-to-a-website-near-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2011\/05\/20\/hacked-canonical-tags-coming-soon-to-a-website-near-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Hacked Canonical Tags: Coming Soon To A Website Near You?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CanonicalGoogle recently alerted website owners of a recent trend involving the hacking of websites to insert a canonical tag<\/a> and point it to the hacker\u2019s site. Is your site at risk? How can you protect against it?<\/p>\n

There’s a great discussion<\/a>\u00a0going on over at Webmaster World about this topic. To give credit where it’s due, it’s quite a bright attack that \u2013 if undetected \u2013 stands to provide potentially more SEO value than the vast majority of spam tactics that I’ve witnessed in my decade plus of experience.<\/p>\n

To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s quickly define the canonical tag.<\/p>\n

What is the Canonical Tag?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

For years, webmasters wrestled with the issue of duplicate content. The majority of these cases were caused by simple product duplication on a series of listings pages.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say a website sells blue widgets. They are ordered on one page by size, on another by color, and on a third by price. That’s three pages with fundamentally the same content.<\/p>\n

Google will try to determine the best possible page to show in the results. Before the canonical tag, webmasters couldn’t define it for themselves, resulting in scenarios where less desirable pages were appearing in the SERPs.<\/p>\n

In 2009 Google announced support<\/a> to the rel=canonical tag allowing website owners to place a tag in their headers indicating which page was to be considered the primary result. Later that year Google announced that the canonical tag was also going to work across domains<\/a>\u00a0allowing webmasters of multiple sites with similar content to define specific content as fundamentally sourced from a different domain.<\/p>\n

The Power of the Canonical Tag<\/strong><\/h2>\n

For any hack to be worth doing it first must hold value. This leads us to the question of whether or not an exploitation of the canonical tag is worth doing in the first place. I found a statement from Google’s Matt Cutts on a related topic very interesting. It takes some reading between the lines so watch the following video from April 2011 and then read on.<\/p>\n