Wordfence creating canonical urls

Hi @arshi01, thanks for dropping us a message.

Generally speaking, Wordfence’s ?wordfence_lh=x&hid=xxx... query string URLs are used by Live Traffic so are completely normal activity, but not normal to see in Google. wordfence_lh is checking whether the visitor was detected as human. hid=... is an encrypted unique identifier so the record can be matched to another in the database.

With other customers, when Google bots start listing them as “legitimate” site pages, this is usually due to a theme or plugin misconfiguration where any invalid page URLs are being redirected to the homepage. The expected behaviour when these specific URLs are visited is to return a totally blank page and for Google not to index them for search results.

Clearing any caches such as Advanced Caching plugin and/or server-side caches you may have on your host might reduce the chance of these URLs being served by mistake in case your theme or other plugins were ever misconfigured in the past.

You may need to contact your theme provider or developer for further assistance, or turn off any settings you have for redirecting any not found/invalid pages to another page on your site – usually the homepage.

Thanks,

Peter.

Can you share where your other customers found that the error was being caused by their theme or plugin? Because in my case, you are very conveniently shifting blame.

And these urls are giving ‘Server error (5xx)’ also in GSC.

Hi @arshi01,

The URLs you’re seeing as listed by Google are URLs used by Live Traffic to identify visitors in 100% of Wordfence installations, yet Google indexing them comes up in a small minority of customers. If you follow one of the URLs, the expected behavior is to show a totally blank page so that it doesn’t appear to resolve to a valid page (so they’re ignored by search engines) on your site.

The example you’ve given us does resolve to a blank page, so the behavior is currently as expected, but caching could be an issue so that’s why I requested those to be cleared. We’ve known redirection plugins, or behavior of some themes redirect these pages to the homepage so that’s the fastest thing to try immediately.

So that we can look a little closer at your Wordfence configuration, can you send a diagnostic report to wftest @ wordfence . com? You can find the link to do so at the top of the Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

NOTE: It should look as follows – Screenshot of Tools > Diagnostic > Send by Email

Thanks again,

Peter.

The url I sent is not redirecting to a blank page, but to the home page. All your urls are redirecting to the homepage.

Hi @arshi01,

For some reason, before I replied, I clicked the link and was given a blank page so assumed this was now correct but yes I do see that the redirect to the homepage happens.

I have spoken with the development team, and all cases of Google indexing our querystring URLs are down to improper redirection either in the theme or a separate redirection plugin as I originally stated. A good way to test this would be to disable your theme and all plugins except for Wordfence and attempt to follow the URL again.

If you see the blank page as designed, reenable your plugins and theme one-by-one, viewing the link after each item is enabled. When the redirections to the homepage come back, that will be the cause that needs to have redirections reconfigured (if possible) or removed. Sometimes there is a setting to tell the site what to do in event of a 404 Page Not Found, etc.

Thanks again,

Peter.

Wordfence plugin was deactivated. Now that I activated it, it’s showing blank pages. But I don’t want these pages at all. I want them gone from GSC.

I am getting this ?wordfence_lh=x&hid=xxx urls but the site is no longer WordPress. All the WordPress files were deleted.
What is one to do?