Internal site search spam attacks can be a nightmare.
They are well-disguised, hidden away from plain sight. And the longer they stay on your site; they prove to be harmful. As they are hard to detect, many website owners fail to notice them until it’s too late.
In this knowledgebase article, we’ll show you how to ensure you never become a victim of internal site search spam hacks with the help of the Rank Math plugin.
1 What Is an Internal Site Search Spam?
It is common to see a website with an internal search feature. Websites with search features benefit users because they can easily find what they are looking for without going through all the pages.
Depending on how your search function is built, it can add malicious scripts and code onto your website and allow the spammers to access your uniquely created search pages. Because you can type anything into the search box on a wordpress site, it will return something on the search results page, and that’s what Google indexes. These are nothing but spammy internal site search links.
Examples of Internal Site Search Spam Links:
- https://yoursite.com/?s=cheap online pharmacy – check this link – www.site.com
- https://website.com/?s=buy my fake Gucci bag from www.mywebsite.com
With that said, it’s no secret that Google hates spammy internal site search links. You could get penalized if you have too many of these links on your site.
2 Fix Internal Site Search Spam Using Rank Math
If you don’t manage the SEO settings for your site, these pages might get crawled, indexed, and ranked.
Rank Math lets you enable or disable the indexing of the search result pages. We recommend you to enable this setting and not index your search results pages.
To do so, navigate to Rank Math SEO → Tiles & Meta → Misc Pages from your WordPress dashboard. Enable the Noindex Search Results option, as shown below.
And that’s it! We hope this article helped you to fix the internal site search spam using Rank Math. If you still have questions, you’re always more than welcome to contact our dedicated support team, and we’re available 24/7, 365 days a year…