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Mass spamming of ?query- in URL requests

Coming from Google and other sources.

         

JAB Creations

3:29 am on Mar 17, 2024 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



At some point in the past few months almost all of the URLs in the logs starting containing this:

?query=

This is coming from pages loaded by Google and other sources, it seems completely random.

I tried using all of the major search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo and Yandex) however even with the quote operator I couldn't find anything.

I've made no changes to the server let alone to the configuration.

My best guess is that this likely has something to do with cPanel though I can't confirm since I don't know what I'd be looking for. The slightest chance it could be some really odd off-beat update to PHP though they don't seem to screw things up like that.

I've checked:

- .htaccess, no changes.
- PHP code, no instances of $_GET['query'] or query=.
- Search engines fail to honor "?query=" query.
- No changes to robots.txt.
- The cPanel forums are active though their login page redirects and even after loading still fails; no idea what I'd post there if I could authenticate.

It could be an external issue, Google has been acting really wonky suddenly having issues but no issues or anything invalid with the robots.txt file.

Suggestions please?

John