I've just seen in Google Search Console that Google is doing 3 things with spammy internal search links.
The link structure is always www.example.com/search?q=[spammy link here]
- Around 500 are green and indexed (they don't appear on the sitemap but are indexed in the overall page indexing)
- Around 300 are grey and blocked by
robots.txt
(the instruction here is disallow /search) - 400 more are orange, indexed, though blocked by
robots.txt
My robots.txt
is set to disallow /search.
Do you know why:
- these spam links are doing 3 different things
- will they impact my site negatively (I've seen some drop in visits since this spam started)
- Is there anything I can do about it?
Thank you, I've been Googling for days and still confused about a solution.
/search
in robots.txt? Are some of them using some other URL path?