Wordfence generating links

Hi @liathess, thanks for your question.

These URLs have been known to show up in Google search/Search Console due to an automatic redirect to a search or home page when a 404 is hit on your site. This can be down to a misconfigured theme, or a redirect plugin purposely changing 404 behavior. When one of the wordfence_lh URLs is followed, the page should be totally blank in the browser. They are essential URLs used by Live Traffic to identify a human or bot visit, along with an ID to confirm whether they’re a new visitor or have been to your site before.

If you are seeing blank pages for them currently, the ones you are seeing could be from Google remembering old URLs and trying them again to update their index. Google should recognize over time that those paths are not useful to crawl.

We used to recommend adding wordfence_lh and hid to the list of parameters that Google can ignore, but it looks like that feature has been removed from Google Search Console: https://searchengineland.com/google-search-consoles-url-parameter-tool-is-officially-not-working-383828

Thanks,
Peter.

Hello Peter,

thank you for the reply. I am not sure if i wrote about my issue correctly, so i will try to make it more particular. These wordfence generated urls point to existing single posts, they do not redirect to the homepage.

I do have website searches redirect to 404 though, but this wordfence behavior -generating wordfence links- started before i implemented searches to 404.

When I try accessing this page, https://www.thecover.gr/?wordfence_lh=fasbflablafbhl, I am redirected to the main page. I think that you have a plugin redirecting query strings to the main page and redirecting any URL that isn’t valid to the main page.
The problem is that https://www.thecover.gr/wordfenceTesting (a bad URL) returns the proper http response code (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found)
Any query string that is invalid gets a HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently response.
The reason Google thinks your “https://www.example.gr/?wordfence_lh=”fasbflablafbhl” pages are valid is because they don’t return the 404 error. That error would stop Google from crawling those pages. You’ll need to find where the redirection happens (.htaccess file? Plugin? Your theme?) and adjust the settings to return the proper response. Then you’ll need to wait until Google drops them.

Mia