Has the Canonical Spam Hack been patched?

[wonderpunter]

I noticed lots of improved scores today across all of my sites, I also noticed the top 20 looks very different in igaming for many many keywords. the low effort 7 page spam sites using canonicals have all vanished? is it too good to be true?

[alperseo]

Short answer: partially patched but exploit variants still work in specific scenarios.

For context for anyone reading this later: the "canonical spam hack" generally refers to attackers exploiting rel=canonical to siphon ranking signals from a high-authority page to a spam target — Google honors canonical declarations as hints, and historically there's been ambiguity in how Google resolves canonical conflicts.

What changed in 2025:
- Google's John Mueller confirmed they tightened canonical chain validation in late 2024 — pages pointing canonical to unrelated topical content are now mostly ignored
- The "same content with canonical to high-DR target" variant still works because Google can't fully distinguish syndicated content from spammed copies
- The "redirect chain to canonical" variant largely patched

In gambling vertical I've seen reports of operators getting their mirror addresses targeted by this — competitors using canonical manipulation to demote the operator's current address. The defense that worked for us was self-canonicals on every active mirror plus fast updates to sitemap lastmod.

If you have a specific case where it's still being exploited, sharing the pattern (without the target URL obviously) would help others recognize it.