Beware!

The “trash pages” as you put it, are the result of using the plugin when any sort of page-caching is enabled on site. This is explained on the plugin homepage, installation instructions, plugin settings page, Help tab, readme.txt, and elsewhere. I’m not sure how to make it more clear:

Do not use this plugin on sites that have any sort of page caching.

Page caching prevents dynamic plugins like Blackhole from working correctly. I make every effort to explain this via warnings and information posted all over the place. So if you do not read and/or ignore the warnings, and decide to use the plugin on a site that is caching pages, then things will not work correctly.

For example, if you use the plugin on sites with page caching, search engines may index the “blocked” versions of your pages. Even after removing the plugin and clearing/resetting the page cache, it can take some time for the search engines to crawl and index the correct content. One thing that can help is to visit Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and request to have your pages re-crawled.

As for this statement:

“More than 6 months after deletion its still generating trash pages on Google Search Console”

Please understand, once the plugin is removed/deleted from your site, it is impossible for it to have a direct effect on anything, because the code no longer exists. So if you are still getting “trash pages” in the search results, it means that something else is happening, like maybe the cache is not yet properly or completely cleared. Or maybe the search engine is crawling previously indexed (cached) links. But it’s not the plugin doing it, because again it is impossible for the code to do anything if it does not exist on site.

Best advice is to reach out to the search engines and ask if they can help. Hopefully there is something they can do to help re-crawl and re-index your pages.

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 5 days ago by Jeff Starr.