• Resolved BilalKhan

    (@bilal7k)


    Hi,

    I’m using Wordfence on my new WordPress site, and I’ve noticed many suspicious URLs appearing in Google Search Console under the “Crawled – Currently Not Indexed” tab.

    Example URL: https://example.com/?wordfence_lh=1&hid=60F8AD9B5D4668604FE672A69F1027D1

    There are around 1000 of these URLs, which is more than the number of pages on my site.

    Can you please explain why these URLs are being created and crawled? How can I stop this from happening and resolve the issue?

    Thank you!

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  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @bilal7k, thanks for your question.

    These URLs have been known to show up in Search Console due to an automatic redirect to a search or home page when a 404 is hit on your site. This can be down to a misconfigured theme, or a redirect plugin purposely changing 404 behavior. When one of the wordfence_lh URLs is followed, the page should be a totally blank page in the browser. They are essential URLs used by Live Traffic to identify a human or bot visit, along with an ID to confirm whether they’re a new visitor or have been to your site before – but shouldn’t serve any content.

    If you?are?seeing blank pages for them currently, the cases in Google Search Console are old URLs that have been crawled in the past. Google should eventually re-crawl and determine the paths aren’t valid pages, so should remove them although we aren’t aware of what timescale is on that.

    We used to recommend adding wordfence_lh and hid to the list of parameters that Google can ignore, but that feature has been removed: https://searchengineland.com/google-search-consoles-url-parameter-tool-is-officially-not-working-383828

    When Google Search Console lists them as “Crawled – currently not indexed”, it looks like it might have been a problem in the past, maybe your theme, plugins, or other custom code was removed from your site.

    Thanks,
    Peter.

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