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Sounds like point 2 was a negative seo attack. It could be that your /?s page is being cached and getting picked up via crawlers. You can avaoid this by no cac

• weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
  Cache has nothing to do with this But yes just noindex search pages like they already said they did
  • dazc 10mo ago
    Not sure how search result pages can be crawled unless they are cached somewhere?
    • margalabargala 10mo ago
      If I'm reading correctly, it's not that your search results would be crawled, it's that if you created a link to www.theirwebsite.com/search/?q=yourspamlinkhere.com or otherwise submitted that link to google for crawling, then the google crawler makes the same search and sees the spam link prominently displayed.
      • Barbing 10mo ago
        Yikes. What could Google do to mitigate?
        • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
          You noindex search pages or anything user generated, it's really that simple
          • nolito 10mo ago
            Not enough. According to this article (https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/pludselig-dukkede-nyhed-op-der-kaldte-flugger-beskyldninger-ondsindede-googles-ai-er-blevet https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/penge/pludselig-dukkede-nyhed-op-d... you probably need to translate) its enough to link to an authorative site that accepts a query parameter. Googles AI picks up the query parameter as a fact. The artile is about a danish compay probably circumventing sanctions and how russian actors manipulate that fact and turn it around via Google AI
            • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
              Yeah all pages should have a proper canonical which would solve this too
        • firefoxd 10mo ago
          In this case, all i had to do was let the crawler know not to index the search page. I used the robots noindex meta tag on the search page.
    • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
      I don't know what you mean by cache but you aren't using it correctly...
  • MobiusHorizons 10mo ago
    I think the question is “how are the behavior of random spammers on your search page getting picked up by the crawler”? The assumption with cache is that searches of one user were being cached so that the crawler saw them. Other alternatives I can imagine are that your search page is powered by google, so it gets the search terms and indexes the results, or that you show popular queries somewhere. But you have to admit that the crawler seeing user generated search terms points to some deeper issue.
    • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
      You just link to that page from a page that Google crawls. Cache isn't involved unless you call links caching
      • MobiusHorizons 10mo ago
        Ah that makes sense, thanks for clarifying.