“?wordfence_logHuman=1&hid” error years after Wordfence removal

Hi @androgenicalopecia, thanks for reaching out.

Wordfence hasn’t used the query parameter wordfence_logHuman for quite some time, so it seems to tally with your removal of the plugin as there haven’t been subsequent updates in the background or anything like that. Those URLs were used by Live Traffic so were normal to see on sites actively using the plugin.

When Google bots originally started listing these as legitimate site pages, it may have been due to a theme or plugin redirecting invalid page URLs to your homepage, or another page on your site. The expected behaviour when these URLs are visited is to return a blank page – and therefore Google to never list them. They do sometimes recall old URLs and try them again to update the index but should recognize over time that those paths are not useful to crawl any more.

It may be worth taking a look at how to manually remove Wordfence, just in case there’s any residual content left behind: https://www.wordfence.com/help/advanced/remove-or-reset/#remove-or-reset

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

Thanks,
Peter.