Google have provided us a good method to save our sites from duplicate content and give us a choice to choose the desired content which we really feel relevant to our website. But I have to say that this method is being abused in a way which I haven’t thought before.
Yes, people are using canonical url for transferring Google PR to another pages of their website for sake of link building. Following are the methods used by many people on their website which I have seen (Please don’t use these methods as I am only providing this as a Proof).
- Firstly they will create a link or resource page on their website for link exchange purpose.
- After that they will use canonical tag on this particular resource or link page and make it canonical with respect to the home page or some other page which already have high PR.
- Now what happens that after Google updates its PR the resource page or link page automatically gets the PR of that page which is used as canonical.
- Now all is set for the blunder i.e they use it for link exchange and people start linking to that page without knowing what’s going behind the scene.
I really don’t know if Google really treat this as unethical but I am really surprised to see that how canonical url can be abused in this way. I will say and suggest that please don’t use unethical methods to get backlinks for your website because in long run you will have to suffer as Google periodically updates its algorithms and I am sure that this type of unethical link building method will not exist for a long time.