What does {search_term_string} mean in my backend search results?

HI Tessa. Where are you seeing this?

Which theme are you using?

It’s a custom child theme of Neve, and the child theme doesn’t have any additional customizations like better-search-template.php to customize the search results display.

Here’s a screenshot of the “Popular Searches” post box as seen from the admin dashboard. The {search_term_string} appears as the largest search term in this block (other terms redacted for client’s privacy).

When I view the admin page at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=bsearch_popular_searches, it appears in the #1 spot with the highest “Total searches” number but zero “Daily searches”.

I just googled this out and it is apparently related to the Google Bot trying to get through the search box. I don’t think there is a way to block this unless you do it directly via htaccess or nginx conf rules as per link below.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/mosanu/how_do_block_google_crawler_from_crawling_the/

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by Ajay.

That is interesting! I’ve already had that set in my robots.txt file like this:

User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s =*

But I recognize robots.txt is more of a suggestion rather than a way to actually block. I’ll see about the redirect. Thanks!

Once I put the fix in there, about how long will the results take to recalculate? I imagine daily is daily. I guess the other depends on traffic/number of searches?

Edit: omg, I just realized after posting this that there is a SPACE after the s and before the = in my robots.txt file. Maybe that was it!!

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by Tessa (they/them), AuRise Creative.

You can delete the search result from the Popular Searches page and keep the tracking. I suspect it will continue for a while until Google figures things out.

Done! Thank you!