WordPress with SOFT 404 in Google Search Console (WMT) What causes Q82019309.com?

Question

My brothers site that I designed for him awhile has hundreds of SOFT 404's reported in Google's Search Console formerly Webmaster Tools. Generally I find fixing soft 404 easy but this has me a little stumped. All the soft errors are returning a odd string that contains Q82019309.com with the occasional sub folder Aristocratwithin the string /?=.

The 404's generally look something like:

• Encoded: /search/%E5%A4%A7%E5%A5%96%E6%80%BB%E4%BB%A3Q82019309.com
• Decoded: /search/大奖总代Q82019309.com

The linked from information provides:

• Encoded: /?s=%E5%A4%A7%E5%A5%96%E6%80%BB%E4%BB%A3Q82019309.com
• Decoded: /?s=大奖总代Q82019309.com

At first I believed this was an isolated issue but upon investigating I discovered that this issue actually affects thousands of websites and someone must know the cause. When I Google Q82019309.com WordPress or Aristocrat Q82019309.com I'm overwhelmed with the amount of results, including some of highly reputable sites such as:

• Screaming Frog
• Ellenshop
• Saver Stores UK

Question(s):

So what is causing these soft 404 errors with string Q82019309.com with or without Aristocrat.

Answer 1

We were having the same issue at wisepops.com since the 3rd January 2017.

Google is complaining about Soft 404 even if indexing is disabled on these pages. The Wordpress search page has by default this meta:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

I decided to make search pages without results return a 404 HTTP code. Since the search query is in the URL, it is fine to handle it this way.

For Wordpress, I added at the end of my theme's functions.php:

/*---------------------------------------------------*/
/*  SEARCH PAGES WITHOUT RESULTS SEND 404 HTTP CODE  */
/*---------------------------------------------------*/
function wisepops_search_404_code() {
    if (is_search() && !have_posts()) {
        header($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] . ' 404 Not Found');
        $GLOBALS['wp_query']->is_404 = true;
    }
}
add_action('get_header', 'wisepops_search_404_code');

Answer 2

It looks to me like your something is linking to your site search functionality with bad queries. Those search queries get "no results found". Googlebot is finding those links and you are allowing Googlebot to crawl your site search. Because of the "no results", Google is detecting them as "soft 404".

Letting Google crawl your site search results is a big no-no. It can get your entire site penalized by Google. See Matt Cutts: Search results in search results. You should disallow all crawling of search results using robots.txt:

Disallow: /search
Disallow: /?s=

Then Googlebot will not crawl those URLs and report errors there either.

Answer 3

This plugin sorted the problem for me:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-search-slug/