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I'm a little puzzled with the following problem:

When I hover over a link a WordPress site I'm looking after, I can see that the URL is https://xxxxxxx.com/apply-now/?

All the links on the page have an ? appended to the end of them.

I'm not sure where this is being set, and to make matters more confusing, the ? does not appear when you view the page source for the page. i.e. the anchor tag would look like href="https://xxxxxx.com.au/apply/"

I've had a look through some of the places I would expect this to be set, but I can't see anything i.e. bitnami.conf, apache.conf, htaccess.conf, etc.

It's a Bitnami stack, with apache, serving a WP site.

I can't seem to find a plugin that might be rewriting things.

It seems like something is adding a parameter to the URL on every single page, which ends up confusing crawlers like Screaming Frog and GoogleBot.

Any suggestions?

Cheers

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  • Do you have any rewrite rules (either in .htaccess or in apache conf)? Can you edit you post to include them. Especially any that have the QSA (query string append) flag.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Dec 20, 2021 at 7:20
  • Could this be caused by JavaScript? Do you see the question mark added via a redirect if you test with curl.se on the command line like curl --head https://example.com/page?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Dec 20, 2021 at 7:21
  • to checkit first: disable your browser javascript. for example Turn Off JavaScript in Firefox see: lifewire.com/disable-javascript-in-firefox-446039
    – saeed arab sheybani
    Dec 20, 2021 at 8:24
  • .com/apply-now/ vs .com.au/apply/ - Is this just a typo in the question, or is the URL-path and TLD also changing on hover?
    – MrWhite
    Dec 20, 2021 at 11:11
  • If you only see this when "hovering over a link" (and presumably persists when you follow the link) then this can only be client-side, not server-side (eg. URL rewriting) as appears to be the focus in the question. How is this "confusing crawlers"? Are they issuing a warning? Duplicate URLs?
    – MrWhite
    Dec 20, 2021 at 11:18

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