Google reporting /?s= pages in GSC

Hey dethfire,

Thank you for using Enfold.

Have you tried disallowing crawlers from indexing pages with the search query? This can be done in the robot.txt file as described in the following thread.

// https://kriesi.at/support/topic/how-to-exclude-internal-search-results-to-be-indexed-properly-robots-txt/

All you need is this line

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

This is according to Yoast’s.

// https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/

Best regards,
Ismael

Hey!

Blocking Google from the page doesn’t remove the page from the index.

You can ask google to re-crawl the site or validate the fix that you have implemented for the errors or warnings. Please check these articles.

// https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl=en > Details page section
// https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?hl=en

Make sure that the robot.txt rule is set before doing so.

Cheers!
Ismael

Hi,

Google will reprocess your whole site or the pages that you’ve asked them to re-crawl, so if they find that the pages with the search query is no longer accessible, then it will be reflected in your search console. Make sure to validate the fix that you have done as described in the documentation. Previously, there is a button that allows to manually mark these errors or warnings as fix, if you already implemented a solution for those errors, but this button is no longer available.

However, if you really want to add or set the noindex meta tag when the search query is present, try this filter in the functions.php file instead.

add_filter('avf_set_follow','av_set_nofollow');
function av_set_nofollow(){
	if ((is_single() || is_page() || is_home() ) && ( !is_paged() || !$_GET['s'] ))
		{
			$meta = '<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />' . "\n";
		}
		else if( is_search() || $_GET['s'] )
		{
			$meta = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />' . "\n";
		}
		else
		{
			$meta = '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />' . "\n";
		}
	return $meta;
}

You may still need to ask Google to re-crawl your site in order for the changes to reflect, or wait for quite a while for them to automatically index your site.

Best regards,
Ismael