Investigate broken 'jobs page' URLs

[jonoaldersonwp]

I'm seeing a ton of errors in Google Search Console where URLs like ​https://fr-ca.wordpress.org/?p=job/oV6V8fwO/apply&nl=1 and ​https://eu.wordpress.org/?p=job%2Fo67D8fwI&nl=1 are returning a 400 status (and, as you'll see, an obviously broken template).

Do we know what these are / where/why they're being exposed?

The best way to handle this may depend on whether these are (or were) legitimate pages/requests, or, whether this is just some back end weirdness being accidentally exposed.

Insight appreciated!

[dd32]

These are not legitimate URLs.

A request for ?p=... where p is not a numeric value (which is the only value acceptable in a WordPress context) the request returns 400 Bad Request.

Nothing on WordPress.org, or any WordPress.org-related domain should be linking to those.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Super, in which case, can we just make these 404 (template and HTTP header)?

[dd32]

What difference does 400 vs 404 make? in real terms, for URLs that should never be linked to, and are not expected to work.

Unfortunately the 404 template (and the 400 template as you saw) is pretty broken, as it doesn't load the WordPress themes to allow for it.

If someone would like to look into it, public_html/403.php & public_html/404.php are static files that probably should be updated with the new templates.

[jonoaldersonwp]

400s get reported as site errors in GSC, and thus gum up our reporting. It's also bad practice for errors to 'exist' indefinitely in a non-fixed state

Those URLs are getting linked to from 'somewhere', and once they're known to exist, they'll get polled (and explored) forever. We can't ever assume or rely on a URL being 'hidden' as a solution.

[dd32]

ton of errors in Google Search Console

Worth noting that these account for ~400 of the ~600 "Other 4xx errors" recorded in Google Search console.

A tiny amount compared to the number of pages indexed (~1.1Million) or excluded (~3.5million by norobots, 250k by redirects, etc).

I'll take a look into changing that status - probably replacing it with a redirect.

[jonoaldersonwp]

A redirect to where? If we don't have a suitable destination, we shouldn't bulk redirect invalid URLs to the homepage; they should just return a 404 status+template.