1000s of junk Internal search pages indexed

  • Hi Yoast Team,

    I could read that the yoast plugin automatically adds noindex, follow tag for the internal search results.
    <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>

    Even after this, I do not understand how Google has indexed 1000s of my site pages. I want to know how did this happen?


    To prevent this, I recently added Disallow tag for /?s= in the Robots.txt page.

    Does this impact SEO of the site?

    Images References:

    https://freeimage.host/i/HXfS6v4

    https://freeimage.host/i/HXfSQZ7

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

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello @ravibbb

    Thanks for using the Yoast SEO plugin.

    It appears your site has been a victim of internal search spam. By default, the plugin automatically applies a?noindex?directive to your search results page. This keeps these URLs out of Google.

    However, some URL variations suggest some nuance to the attacks. For example, URLs target both??s=example?and?/search/example?formats; where sites might use either, or both, and sometimes have different template logic on each version. That increases their chance of successfully getting their text onto the page, and might help them to work around?noindex?directives.

    We have added crawl cleanup and optimization features in the?Yoast SEO Premium. These features allow you to disable URL formats and features that most sites won’t need search engines to have access to. It also enables you to protect your internal site search URLs from some forms of attack.

    Thread Starter Ravi Bandakkanavar

    (@ravibbb)

    Thanks for the reply @maybellyne

    It seems like the free version of the Yoast plugin cannot prevent internal search spam.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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