[Support request] Spam links and next/previous pages making it worse

[crispeddesktop]

I have spam websites linking to my website using query strings. These strings look like:

https://example.com/page/2/?site=forum_topic&topic=123

My site is not a forum and such strings should not be generated, yet I’m getting a lot of them. The problem is made worse by WordPress because the page is paginated, so the next and previous links also have the ?site=forum_topic&topic=123.

The pages are being canonical correctly, but Google is still ranking some in search and even finding new content through these links before the canonical link, so it’s a mess right now. Is there anything I can do in GeneratePress to stop this? Can I strip the ?site=forum_topic&topic=123 from the URL and leave https://example.com/page/2/?

[David]

Hi there,

GP doesn’t have any control over the permalinks.

Do you know how those query strings are being generated? Maybe a plugin?
If you can share a link to where we can see it we can take a look.

[crispeddesktop]

I have high confidence a plugin is not creating them, unless it’s generating them on the fly? I’ve searched every file and SQL for anything that matches the URLs and found nothing. The only thing I can come up with is that some spam website is back linking to me in this way, and I’m not certain why? It’s creating a mess because the pages are paginated and WordPress autopopulates the next and previous pages with those parameters, which makes the problem exponentially worse.

[David]

For the forum_topic query string to appear in the URLs of the pagination links then something either at the server level or a javascript must be inserting them. Or how else would they be in the HTML?

Have you tried disabling plugins / child themes / custom functions ?

[Author]

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