Add noindex, follow meta tags to search page.

[benlk]

Why

Because with the right search query and aggressive linking to that query, SEO spammers can use a site's search results page to put their message in Google using that site's page rank. In the reported case, the search results page is being used to get a scam phone number into Google's results.

Here's a page of google results for the search query that the scammer is using:

And here's their analytics dashboard:

To state the problem plainly:

1. A spammer puts their desired payload into the search box, and presses search: The URL now contains the spammer's query
2. The spammer takes the URL for the search page with their query and smears it around the internet, using that URL to drive search crawlers so that the desired text ranks highly in Google
3. The spammer profits when someone calls their phone number for support for a bitcoin wallet problem, probably.

See also https://yoast.com/blocking-your-sites-search-results/

Brought up in https://secure.helpscout.net/conversation/754261795/3067?folderId=1211651

The solution

The long-term solution in Largo, which should be implemented as soon as possible.

• add an option, checked by default, to "Prevent search engines from indexing your site's internal search pages. This is recommended because the pages have no internal value"
• display the <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> tag on search pages in the header

The short-term solutions:

• add Yoast SEO plugin?
• manually edit robots.txt