Sudden explosion of pages with errors

  • Recently got a huge surge in randomly generated “server error” pages on our website:

    View post on imgur.com

    Got 4000 proper pages, and 1400 pages with errors in them generated by a… search bot? Some kind of external program?

    View post on imgur.com

    Obviously, these aren’t pages that anyone associated with the site intentionally created (though they all feature the email of a former employee in their randomly generated URL, don’t know if that means anything).

    Is there a way to delete or disavow them in some fashion?

    • This topic was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by Jan Dembowski.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • The URLs in the screenshot are a strange use of WordPress’ own search function. The parameter “s” performs a search in it. The search results pages are, as far as I can see, correctly set to “noindex”, which is why search engines should not include them at all. Also in robots.txt you seem to have already entered some URLs: https://lawoffice.org.il/robots.txt

    How you can clean up the list in Search Console you should ask in the Google community for this tool.

    However, it is also strange how these URLs can appear in Google. You are using WordPress 5.6.8 – which is still updated, but do you have all plugins up to date?

    Thread Starter sashakishko

    (@sashakishko)

    Yeah, we tried to disallow those elements that all the search pages seemed to have in common. Didn’t help, unfortunately.

    Which plugins would help with this? I’ll confess to not updating them consistently.

    As already written above, it is rather a problem of the Google Search Console (GSC), because the GoogleBot recognizes too many URLs. These are already correctly indicated by your WordPress with noindex whereby Google should actually already exclude them from the index. To clarify how the Search Console can now clean them up, you should contact a GSC community. This cannot be further influenced by any WordPress plugin.

    And of course you should also keep your plugins as up to date as possible. If you don’t, a security hole in a plugin could endanger your whole project.

    However, one more note about the strange URLs: Google only picks them up if the GoogleBot finds them somewhere in exactly the same form. “Somewhere” can be on your site as well as on any other website on the Internet. Of course, you can hardly influence that. By specifying “noindex” your WordPress prevents the inclusion of these URLs in the search index of Google actually already correct.

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