m-one

Except unfortunately still returning results from all cats – anything wrong with my code:

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" class="searchform" action="http://www.mysite.dev/"> 
<label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label> 
<input type="hidden" name="cats" value="CatName">
<input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" /> 
<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value=">" /> 
</form>

Tried using cat slug and name – same result.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by m-one.

Hi – thanks for that.

This is baffling me:

Issue noticed when using site:mysite.com google search.

On the last page of results I get the “If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included” option.

When I use it I see pages of additional results – all existing pages but with /?s= appended to the url.

The results are all formatted as follows:

Search – Mysite
https://www.mysite.com/mypage/?s=
A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt
Learn more

Clicking one of these links takes you to a “Not here? Try another search.” page.

Removing the ?s= from the end of the URL opens the real page as expected.

If I perform a real site search all is as expected – site search results page source contains:

<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v5.2 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>

Disabling plugins and themes and waiting for the changes to affect serps is simply not an option on a live commercial site.

So can anybody give me a clue as to what these “ghost” search pages might be so that I can try to track down what’s causing them to be indexed (when they don’t exist)?

Many Thanks.

Hi Lukas – yes. Viewing source showed MM page was coming from WPRocket despite having deactivating the plugin. Reactivating it and clearing its cache resolved the issue.

Best, M

Afraid not:

1. Dashboard -> Events -> Theme Options and hit Save Option

2. Deleted offending cache directory

3. 1. Dashboard -> Events -> Theme Options and hit Save Option again to be on safe side.

4. refresh page of site

Result – offending directory is created again.