Hi @detfroe24, thanks for your message.
The ?s= after your URL signifies the string is a standard WordPress search term attempt that probably results in no action like a search results page with no results or a 404.
We have seen on rare occasions that a spam website adds links for WordPress search query string URLs for other websites. The WordPress search query string URLs for these other websites contain spam keywords. When a bot, such as Google’s crawler, finds such a URL it will crawl it and index that spam WordPress search query string URL in Google search results. This happens because WordPress generates a page that says, “Sorry, but nothing matched your search terms. Please try again with some different keywords.” Google considers this to be hitting a legitimate website page and indexes it because WordPress didn’t add a noindex parameter to the robots meta tag for search query string URLs. This appears to be an attempt by spammers to improve the search engine optimization for their spam website but would not really work for improving their search engine optimization.
WordPress fixed this in version 5.7:
We suspect that when Google crawls these URLs again in future, Googlebot will see the noindex parameter and start to remove these URLs from its index and search results pages.
Thanks,
Peter.
Hello Peter,
thank you very much for your quick and helpful answer!
Many greetings
Detlef