That issue with Wordfence URLs

When looking through indexing reports in GSC, I discovered some links generated by Wordfence.

The issue

The links looked somewhat like this: https://mydomain.no/?wordfence_lh=1&hid=DCF5FA....

The pages for these links were completely empty and not added intentionally by me. They were also piling up in the “Crawled - currently not indexed”- report.

This should really not be an issue since Google basically says these are not worth indexing by putting it under the currently not index report.

But in my instance, some of the URLs even showed up as indexed and with URL references from my own domain. When checking my source code, they were nowhere to be found.

The solution

When researching the issue a bit more I found a blog post by Matt Tutt ⤴, where he experienced a similar problem. He explained the links are used for live traffic stats, and gave some solutions to stop them from appearing.

To try and make these links go away I decided to block these in my robots.txt:

Two months went by and the links disappeared.

Then appeared under blocked from crawling:

This made my unsure if the “blocked by robots.txt” report would keep rising indefinitely, and made me want to reach out on Twitter:

The feedback didn’t give me any clear actions but made me want to keep watching the indexing reports.

After some time, I observed that the "blocked by robots.txt"-report decreased, and seemingly was ok.

“Indexed - blocked by robots.txt” was also going away.

Although I’m not really sure if this solved the issue, it’s nice to have less clutter in my indexing reports. The issue also affects all of the sites that I’m working on, which also has Wordfence, this makes me think that a disallow rule should be added to all websites to avoid URL bloating.