If someone enters your archives, as an example, as domain.com/page/2 and add a nonsense query string, that nonsense query is not filtered out, and ends up being perpetuated in your "next page - previous page" links.
This allows someone to ruin your Google listings by adding tons of duplicate content, by linking to a single page on your site with the garbage query, which Google then follows on and on, indexing all those pages and punishing you for duplicate content.
Bumping up... anyone have an answer? Idea? is there a way I can submit this bug for consideration in a future version?
Posted 5 months ago #
But... those infinite link possibilities with appended garbage are not indexable by Google. I mean, Googlebot is not indexing those tons of links you may come up with while querying, they just exist for you, your browser and your query. Googlebot will follow links that are actually written on the markup.
Bea, the problem I am seeing is that people who are trying to generate negative links to your site, to penalize your site in the Google search results will set up pages with the initial crap links on them, perhaps adding them as spam in forums and as comment spam. Once Google gets ahold of a single link like page 2 I showed above, WordPress perpetuates the problem by always providing the page, and providing "previous - next" page links with the junk query appended on them. That means every other page in the series is now duplicate content as far as Google is concerned.
When you have that done a few times, Google ends up thinking you are trying to spam their index, and drops your site.
I am not sure why the "previous - next" links on the page automatically copy over the query without consideration for it's validity, nor do I understand returning a page with a crap query as valid. These crap queries should be truncated and removed, and the browser sent a 301 to the actual valid content, without the query. Returning a valid 200 code and a page is a horrible thing to do, and makes wordpress sites vunerable to all sorts of negative search engine action.
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