google chose another canonical than user

[ocelotus]

Hi, everyone,

Here is a few days ago I discovered a big problem in my search console, on almost all the indexed pages I have a canonical url completely different from what i set. I explain it with an example

One page url: https://mysite.com/collection/products/produit1
declared canonical url: https://mysite.com/products/produit1
url that google has chosen to index: https://anothersite.com/products/produit1

so for product1 google chose to index the page product1 with the url of another domain name, but my domain name is new and I bought it on shopify and there is no redirection. I do not understand at all.

Really confusing.
Please if someone could help me, it would be really great.

 

[Nargil]

How can it possibly choose a different domain? Canonicals are supposed to tell Google which page of your site, in case there are duplicates, is the relevant one and rest should be ignored. It works within the site itself.

However, it's merely a suggestion and Google doesn't always follow the canonical tag, but that happens only within the site.

Is that "anothersite.com" owned by you? Didn't your content get stolen or something? If the domain is yours, is it on the same hosting? Didn't you set up your hosting wrong?

 

[Mr Positive]

This is really weird and should not have happened in the first place, can you recheck the page and fetch it via console and see if the issue gets sorted

 

[ocelotus]

Thanks gas for replying, yes it is weird.

This is a shopify store and I bought the domain from Shopify and the seconde domaine is not mine.
One of my freinds suggested that it may be a canonical negative SEO, I don't know
I tried to purchase a product on the other site who looks exactly like mine and I saw on my Shopify dashboard the information that I started a checkout.
If the other site was trying to steal my trafic normally I couldn't find any information for starting a checkout in my dashboard.

Could a theme do this if it's corrupted.?

I'll show you gays with a screenshot of my GSC

 

[ocelotus]

And this probleme concern a lot of page, and also I found in the GSC a redirection from my home page to the other home page . I didn't put any redirection. Really I don't understand.

 

[Nargil]

Canonicals can be set up within your site only. If I went to my site and set up a canonical to a different site, the only thing I could achieve would be to fuck up my domain. You can't really do negative SEO this way.

And yes, if you are using some nulled theme or sketchy theme, then that indeed might be an issue alright.

 

[leiferikson]

I'm not super familiar with Shopify themes but definitely try a different one temporarily, do a view source and check the canonical URL to see if that fixes it.

 

[ocelotus]

look gays, i have 60 pages with redirections from my domaine name to the seconde domain name, but i didn'i do any one

sorry it's in french but the point is here
and know i thinks it comes from shopify, i checked the seconde domain name with shopify inspector and it has the same store name

 

[Nargil]

Then it's either a Shopify hack or Shopify bug.

Also, edit the picture and hide your URLs asap.

 

[inclaminated]

I'll show you gays

I think you meant guys....
Newbie here but could it be a setting on an seo plugin screwing with you? Maybe check those settings. Otherwise see if shopify will help.

 

[ocelotus]

too late can't edit, and i don't have any seo plugin

how can some one hack me on shopify ?

 

[Nubian Content]

too late can't edit, and i don't have any seo plugin

how can some one hack me on shopify ?

too late can't edit, and i don't have any seo plugin

how can some one hack me on shopify ?

Click report and tell mods to remove it for ya.

 

[Zooker]

This sure has the looks of a 302 redirect hijack. I don't think it's actually a 302 hijack but just them stealing your content and getting indexed first. Actually if the time of index is close the first-to-index may have an advantage but it may not be that easy. You can force a Google crawler to show up quickly to try to index first but I think first you need to DMCA the jerk since they are likely scraping content.

Like I said in your other thread, you need to edit your new content to put something in the middle that isn't obvious that says "this content is stolen from xyz.com" and then it's very easy to DMCA it and clear it up in hours. Depending on how they scrape it, you can ideally put it within the content so it blends in or put in html comments so it's in the source if you view it but not openly visible.

Once their page says blatantly it was stolen from you, you can DMCA them to their host and they'll be taken down in minutes.

If a 302 redirect hijack does occur, how do you block it?

If they 302 to your page, your pages will be able to see their site as a referrer. You don't want to block all referrers since when a user goes from one page to another there is always a referer.

If this was a regular site on apache, i would do something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} BadDomain\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} BadDomain2\.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]​

and it would block their 302 request so the user would see nothing but an error and it'd deny the visitor. I guess that would mean that Googlebot would also not get content so technically that would stop the hijack from that one domain.

The downside is that it only blocks that one domain. Generally you want to allow good sites to refer to your site so you don't want to block all off-site referers unless you are defending against attacks non-stop.

​

I'm not sure if there's any other way to deal with 302 if it happens. Sorry to get off on a tangent, but it's a rather interesting topic that the best way to defend against is knowledge.