Wordfence Pages in Google Search Console

  • Resolved Stephen

    (@kosteph)


    7 months, 1 week ago

    Hello,

    As the title suggests, I always have around 300+ wordfence pages in Google Search Console Pages (Crawled / not indexed). They are like this:

    https://example.com/?wordfence_lh=1&hid=05A7BA1

    Read a few support pages around here and the general reply is always: the page should return a blank page and not redirect to homepage, which is what causes this problem.

    Well, all my example.com/?wordfence_lh=1&hid=05A7BA1 pages return a blank page, so no issue there. Yet I still see them in Search Console by the hundreds.

    Any solutions?

    Thanks,
    Stephen

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @kosteph

    That query string URL will generate a blank page and thus will never be added to Google’s database of site URL’s to be crawled.

    It is used by the plugin to try and detect human activity instead of a bot for the Tools >> Live Traffic page feed reporting.

    Because in the past page content was showing for the URL’s and not a blank page then Google deemed these to be a legitimate site pages and why they are showing up in your Search Console now. This was most likely due to a fault in the theme or a different theme you were using and the incorrect use of the WordPress template_redirect hook.

    Eventually Google will mark those URL’s with a Soft 404 response and you will have to wait for Google to remove them from its database.

    Thread Starter Stephen

    (@kosteph)

    Thanks for the response. Like I said they are blank, and no theme changes have been done in a couple of years actually, so that’s just weird.

    There are over 1300 pages like this currently in the crawled not indexed section of Google, and I have dozens of them even for yesterday (April 16). Again, no theme changes or plugin changes recently, so that answer is only partially inline with what’s happening.

    Cheers,
    Stephen

    dimal

    (@dimalifragis)

    @kosteph

    Try this in your robots.txt (not guaranteed it will work)

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /?wordfence_lh=*

    detoris

    (@detoris)

    Has anyone tried this entry and does it prevent the entries?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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