Search Spam

Admittedly I’m curious how spam traffic is triggering the search box in general, unless it’s all trying to fill out every form it can find in the page.

The suggestions from Algolia support are meant to make it take a few more characters before initial searches are performed, ideally above what amount of characters the bots are using, and then the instant part would be preventing it from just happening automatically, requiring the user to hit submit.

Valid details to help curtail, but I also understand why a site owner would not want to make those changes.

Do you have the website handy that we can review and just double check some things with?

Hi Michael,

Thanks. The site is https://www.timeatlas.com. I’m happy to do a screen share if you want to see what comes into Algolia’s dashboard.

Is it the little-ish eye glass on the right hand side of the menu that triggers the algolia based searching? as is it looks like that’s just standard WordPress search, but you may have disabled since yesterday as well, until some support got received.

Hi,

no, I deleted the Cloudflare rule. I don’t know why it’s now doing that. When I look in dev console, I see uncaught reference jQuery not defined. I’m going to clear cache and see if that resolves.

Clearing cache didn’t help.

OK…maybe I didn’t wait enough. Working now.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by prodport.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by prodport.

sounds good. Does that mean you’re not experiencing any issue at the moment? or do we still need to recommend possible solutions still?

I think there may still be some issues.

1. I still have spam entries going to my Algolia dashboard. See below

“query”: ” Generic cialis 10 mg online Comprar viagra generico online ebay???? https://www.MedicineNet.store ???? Quanto costa il cialis Si puo acquistare il viagra senza ricetta in italia Si puo comprare viagra nelle farmacie senza ricetta”

2. I wonder if your plugin is dependent on jQuery. I don’t think my theme, GeneratePRess, loads it except for the sticky navigation. I’m trying to find that out. That may explain the previous error I saw.

1. Best recommendations we have ourselves at this point are what was already suggested, the increasing minimum characters and turning off the instant search part.
2. Yes the plugin makes use of jQuery in its code, so definitely likely the source of jQuery showing up.

This may or may not help a little as well https://www.algolia.com/doc/faq/basics/too-many-false-unexplained-search-operations/

Thanks Michael.

Algolia had provided those links but I don’t think they apply. If I go to IPs, they all show the same whether I’m the searcher or the spammer. That’s why I went to CloudFlare support.

And I think we can rule out the Google bot.

It was worth a try to test the service, but it clearly doesn’t work with my site. There might be something unique, I don’t know. Obviously, it works for folks like Yoast.

I’ll keep playing till the trial runs out to see if I can solve it. If not, I can’t afford to pay for the erroneous queries.

And I’ll mark the ticket as resolved and figure I’m an outlier case.

Sounds good. Hopefully you find a solution that works all in all for what you need.

Hello,

I have the exact same problem and I’m trying for days to fix it. Did you figure out a solution?

Getting 8k to 10k spam searches a DAY, just like the ones mentioned above.