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Huge Problem with Search + Wordpress Plugin

by galisgos
3 replies
I need some urgent help. The problem is my search terms are being crawled by google. This means that any time anyone has made a search enquiry, the resultant URL is crawled, so they might see

http://www.yourdomain.com/?s=no+resu...ts:no+results:

The worst thing about this is the no results term. When this is searched for, obviously this brings up no results and therefore another page is generated (with another :no results tacked onto the end.

You can see an example here:
no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results:no-resul

It's horrendous really and I think this might be behind my google penalties because there are lots of useless URLS.

Please can you help me remedy this?
#huge #plugin #problem #search #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author jonhel
    Does the blog have a sitemap or search engine optimisation plugin such as SEO Platinum installed? You can refine what gets indexed with these. I couldn't see a sitemap when I checked for the file sitemap.xml in the site directory.

    Jonathan
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    Warrior For Hire - Freelance web developer/troubleshooter/fixer etc. - Affordable website help

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    • Profile picture of the author galisgos
      Hi

      Thanks for the reply. Sorry, the link is not my site but is the best example of giving it.

      What is weird is that looking at it, there is only googlebot crawling the search terms. Because the no-results thing generates yet another search with another no results appended to the end the results are huge. There are thousands of pages crawled like this today for no purpose.

      I fear this is tripping some kind of automated penalty in google as my site has tanked in the rankings.

      I don't know which plug in is doing this. I have narrowed it down to Better Search or Search Unleashed.

      I have disabled these. But how do I clear the search results so Googlebot does not crawl them?
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  • Profile picture of the author jonhel
    I'm not familiar with these plugins but it wouldn't surprise me if they're the culprits! You might want to visit their sites and have a look at their FAQ etc.

    As I said, from what I could see (with no access to the site's admin area to check for sure) there's no XML sitemap for the site. I would recommend generating a sitemap using a plugin such as XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress and once installed and generated, submit it to Google. Google will then regularly check this file and update its index. It won't happen instantly though.

    Hope this helps,


    Jonathan
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    Warrior For Hire - Freelance web developer/troubleshooter/fixer etc. - Affordable website help

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