(Entry was posted by Brenda Malone on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/31/2022).

What can be done about "search results spam" in WordPress?

What can be done about "search results spam" that happens in WordPress? (If that is even what it is called). Search Console is showing more than 12K of these.Just block it in the robots.txt using: Disallow: *?s=*Can more be done?Thank you.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Lisa Brown: looks like WordPress 5.7 included a fix for this: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/52457 more here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/referral-spam-5/

CORE.TRAC.WORDPRESS.ORG#52457 (WordPress vulnerable to search-reflected webspam) â€“ WordPress Trac#52457 (WordPress vulnerable to search-reflected webspam) â€“ WordPress Trac

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Brenda Malone: Lisa Brown Thank you Lisa! I will go see if this client has updated their WordPress. (Probably not, last time I checked they needed 45 updates!)

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Helmut BeriÃ©: I think the disallow statement might be better than an on-page meta tag.In case of the meta tag, the bot still needs to crawl the page so that goes against your crawl budget.

Both achieve that the URLs won`t get indexed though

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