Hello, I been using forminator for a long time but for the past one month my website was getting slow day by day. I found out that google is continuously indexing multiple pages of my website with so unusual query string parameters. So I decided to contact google search console support and they told me that it’s forminator that is generating those URLs.
Is there any way out to stop them otherwise I have to remove forminator from my site:(
Forminator should not be generating any query strings unless there may be some custom code that adds them. Could you provide some examples of the query strings so we can perform a further check on this?
Thank you for response and sharing the screenshot.
This definitely does not look like anything that Forminator would do “by design” or “on purpose. I would say that those may be URLs created due to the form’s “Submission Behavior” (in “Behavior” settings) configuration of “redirect” behavior but it would still be rather unexpected to get that indexed this way – unless the form is and can be submitted by Google crawlers or the redirect URLs are actually “intercepted” somehow on the page and listed in its code.
Still, that wouldn’t be legitimate and expected behavior.
We’d like to take a closer look at this so could you, please:
1. share a link to the page with Formiantor form on your site?
2. share the form itself so we could check it?
To share the form:
– go to “Forminator -> Forms” page and click on the little “gear” icon next to the form in question
– copy given code and put it at pastebin.com service (as public paste)
– and include link to it in your response here
I checked the form and the form is fine, there’s nothing that could be related to it. Formiantor itself is also not generating such links.
However, I took another look at the list of those URLs and it seems like they are following quite specific pattern: the same query var (?te= ) followed by the nubmer that at first appears to be IP but in reality seems to be some sort of ID, follwed by a “search phrase”.
This is in no way caused by Forminator. It looks to be some sort of infection or attack rather than this.
I see you have already blocked access to these URLs via robots.txt but I would strongly recommend thoroughly checking the site against any possible infections. Also review the traffic stats against bots (other than Google) and possible requests TO the site (from sources other than Google) that are made for those “strange” URLs.
It is possible that “something” is exploiting some vulnerability (quite likely in some search function on site) in a way that is/was causing those URL parameters to be “injected” in search results on page and that could be then indexed by Google.
I don’t see any search on site but in page source I see that there seems to be some search JS/AJAX scripts included so that may be something that could possibly be exploited.
