entertheraptor

Solved, plugin removed and replaced with WP Extended Search

Thanks @rsioncke I discovered the same plugin and all is progressing well so far.

Hi @wfsupport

Thanks for responding. I have checked the .htaccess file and it is fine. There is no page redirection, there are no pages.

I do have a Search Console account and have been trying to see what I can do from there but it doesn’t appear to be much. Like you said, because those URL’s resolve to content that is live, Google thinks it’s ok.

The real problem here (you could say) is there is no way to communicate with Google and tell them these URL’s are dodgy

Do you know how to use Htaccess to redirect these URL’s to a 404?

The answer is pretty much no to everything, and some of them return a 404 but others load either the home page or an archive page and these pages are not cached. I deleted everything this morning and the pages I’m now getting are fresh installed WP running 2019 theme and not the site that was there before I deleted everything which is what you would expect to get if it was a cached page. And even Google’s removal tool thinks these pages are live (and not cached).

As for finding files on the server, refer to deleted everything.

Thanks anyway.

Hi @computersimulatorscom

Thanks for trying to help but the problem isn’t what appears in Google search, the problem is that the site displays content for URL’s that don’t exist on the site. Even if I try to use Googles URL removal tool it won’t remove the URL’s from search because it detects that the content that URL points to is still live on the site because it loads content (be it the home page or an archive page) rather than returning a 404 which is what you would expect it to do.

I can’t understand why these URL’s don’t return a 404 even after I deleted the database and all of the site files and did a clean install of WordPress.

Hi @wfdave

Thanks for the suggestions. What I would really like to do though is find the malicious code that is creating these URL’s and remove it rather than just tell Google not to index them. Because if Google can see these URL’s anyway then Google may conclude that the site has been hacked and apply manual actions which is exactly what has happened just this morning to another site I manage.

So the problem isn’t that Google can see these URL’s and is indexing them, the problem is that the site has been hacked and these bogus URL’s exist. And that this has occured while the site was running Wordfence and Wordfence can’t see or detect that anything is wrong.

Also, I don’t actually have a robots.txt.

Cheers, any further ideas would be very much appreciated.

Dunno! Still waiting for a response but after closer inspection it does appear that what is happening is the hero slider is appearing lower on the page with a big margin between the top of the slider and the header.