Spammy page with canonical reference to my website

[brucepomeroy]

A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains

For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site.

If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website.

I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com?

Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.

[effectdigital]

Oh dear what a kerfuffle. People are always searching for new negative-SEO assault deployments!

In February 2018 Moz actually covered the subject of cross-domain canonical tag usage:

• https://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-rel-canonical-seo-value-cross-posted-content

Apparently it can work but only under very specific circumstances:

• The content of the 'canonicaling' URL matches the canonical destination
• The headline of the 'canonicaling' URL's content matches that of the canonical destination
• In-Content Links of the 'canonicaling' URL match those of the canonical destination

So unless the content on their pages happens to be almost identical to the content on the page on your site which the tags are linking to; they're pretty much boneheads and this isn't a major concern.

In all likelihood nothing bad will happen but you could try using Google's Disavow tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main) to send them a signal that you do not wish to be 'associated' with the spam-site in question. It is unknown (or at least I haven't heard) whether the disavow tool covers canonical links. I would think that it would at least prompt Google to fundamentally disassociate the two sites.

More than likely those behind the attack are fully aware that it is extremely unlikely to harm you. They probably have a network of machine-built sites launching the same (fake) attack against thousands of webmasters. My guess is that they are preying on ignorance, hoping that some webmasters will pay them to take the tags off.

DON'T fall for it

[davebuts]

Hi Bruce,

There was a bit of a debate about this recently - whether a cross-domain canonical could be a new type of negative SEO attack: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-negative-seo-via-canonicals-redirects-25614.html

But I personally don't think it would be a successful negative SEO strategy.

Having disavowed the domain, I think you have taken all the precautions you can and I wouldn't be too worried about this having a negative impact on your traffic and rankings.

Cheers,

David

[brucepomeroy]

Thanks for your input David!

[brucepomeroy]

Thanks, good to hear!