Malicious terms in my search index?

  • Resolved neaqwebmaster

    (@w2owebmaster)


    4 years, 10 months ago

    I was looking at my Relevanssi log and I’m seeing a whole string of odd search items that are various iterations of a url like “www.xianggangymcb.xyz” This doesn’t appear on any of my pages, but it does show up if I enter it as a search term on the public site. I’ve added the whole list of terms to the Stopwords list, though that doesn’t seem to have had any effect. It seems like something may have corrupted my Relevanssi index though. Is there some way to view that and clean it up? Or just rebuild the whole thing?

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  • Plugin Author Mikko Saari

    (@msaari)

    To rebuild the index, just click the “Build the index” button on the Relevanssi indexing tab.

    It’s common to have all sorts of garbage in your search logs: that’s just bots spamming your site. However, it’s odd if you have something like that in your index. Nothing should be in your index unless it’s in your posts. If you search for the odd search terms, are they returning results? If so, that post must have the words in them somehow.

    However, if you’re using partial matching and OR operator, searching for a URL will get you a result if a post has any URL in it, the “www” will be enough to produce a match. So it’s possible it’s just that.

    Thread Starter neaqwebmaster

    (@w2owebmaster)

    Thanks, Mikko, that was very helpful. I kind of thought it was just bots running terms into the search field, but when I tried doing a search on one of them myself, yup, got results–virtually every page in the site came up. Even though searching page source on a few turned up nothing. But in light of your last suggestion I entered a search on my own fake url https://www.fakeurl.com, and got the same result! So yeah, must be that it’s just matching on any url whatsoever, not just the suspicious looking ones. I’ll probably just go into the Relevanssi database table and delete them manually as there aren’t that many.

    Marking this as resolved.

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