?swcfpc=1 pages in search console a year after uninstalling the plugin

  • Resolved ropezg

    (@ropezg)


    1 year, 6 months ago

    Hello

    I’ve used your plugin in the past and with time moved to a solution that works better for my website.

    Now, a year or more after uninstalling and removing your plugin I see a lot of URLs in the search console (hundreds!) with the ?swcfpc=1 extension at the end of the URL under the Alternate page with proper canonical tag section.

    Is there a way to remove them, what should I do about that? Should I set a redirect? Why did these get crawled by google bot in the first place?

    thank you!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Contributor iSaumya

    (@isaumya)

    Hi @ropezg,
    If you have removed the plugin then this plugin is no longer adding them, but there are a couple possibilities:

    1. Those swcfpc version of your links is hyperlinked by other websites and people are coming to them
    2. Your website is using some page builder which has modified the URLs to include the query params (some page builders does that). In this case I will suggest you to run a search in your DB to check if there is any mention of swcfpc and if so, modify those URLs to not have them.
    Thread Starter ropezg

    (@ropezg)

    hello

    thanks for getting back to me.

    I don’t use any page builders, but did use a database query and found no mention of swcfpc.
    I don’t know how and why would other websites link with the swcfpc extension, so far I haven’t find any such links.

    Plugin Contributor iSaumya

    (@isaumya)

    Hi @ropezg,
    If you don’t have any mention of swcfpc in your DB that means it’s been completely removed. I guess you can ignore the search console report as it is not gonna hurt you in any ways.

    We’ve experienced this. It isn’t a cache plugin problem. It occurs when for whatever reason a referring page (which Google crawls) has a link that includes the ?swcfpc=1 string. The trick to getting rid of these error notifications in GSC is to click “Inspect URL” on the right of the example URL and then on the next screen find the “Referring page”. This might be a page on your site, in which case you can edit the referring link, or it might be a page on an external site in which case you need to contact the external website owner and ask them to edit the outgoing link. If the referring page is a spam site, you can block the referring domain in your WAF, then Google won’t crawl the link. Once these links are edited or dealt with, these GSC notifications go away the next time Google crawls the referring page. That might be a week, it might be 6 months. It’s worth noting these errors don’t negatively affect SEO.

    Plugin Contributor iSaumya

    (@isaumya)

    Thanks @thomastolkien for your valuable response.

    Thread Starter ropezg

    (@ropezg)

    thank you @thomastolkien, that was very helpful!

    I found out that the wrong URLs have been added to pinterest and now trying to change them

    thank a lot!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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