'I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the UK who routinely checked tripadvisor for anything!'

Counterpoint: I have met people in the UK who's lives revolve around doing nothing but.

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 caching search pages and applying noindex via X-robots tag https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Cache has nothing to do with this

But yes just noindex search pages like they already said they did

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.

You just link to that page from a page that Google crawls. Cache isn't involved unless you call links caching

Ah that makes sense, thanks for clarifying.

Not sure how search result pages can be crawled unless they are cached somewhere?

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.

Yikes.

What could Google do to mitigate?

You noindex search pages or anything user generated, it's really that simple

Not enough. According to this article (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

Yeah all pages should have a proper canonical which would solve this too

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.

I don't know what you mean by cache but you aren't using it correctly...

Breaking News: Google de-indexes random sites all of the time and there is often no obvious reason why. They also penalize sites in a way where pages are indexed but so deep-down that no one will ever find them. Again, there is often no obvious reason.

Do you have any resources here? The /r/seo subreddit seems vers superficial coming from an web agency background so its hard to find legit cases versus obvious oversights. Often people make a post describing a legit sounding issue on there just to let it shine through that they are essentially doing seo spam.

Or if you search for content which you know exists on the web and it suddenly takes an unusual amount of coaxing (e.g. half a sentence in quotes, if you remember it correctly word for word) before it brings up the page you're looking for

Like, isn't this a well-known thing that happens constantly no matter if you're a user or run any websites? Relying on search engine ranking algorithms is russian roulette for businesses sadly, at least unless you outbid the competition to show your own page as an advertisement when someone searches your business' name

Totally. They've completely lost the plot.

There are good businesses out there that don't get a lot of reviews because they don't ask for them. Relying upon customers to do this without a prompt is not something I'd recommend.

https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/OBR_Economic_and_fiscal_outl... 5.pdf

Not hard to guess really. Wouldn't they know this was likely and simply choose a less obvious file name?

Turn out, no. Not they would not.

No mention of tunnels?

Checks Cloudflare Status - yeah, everything's hunky dory bro.

And how much is to make it look like work, blowing that single leaf up and down the driveway is fooling no one.

Quite amusing once you know the real answer.

I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.

Yeah, some people just love the sound of their own voice.

I find that even most 45 minute podcasts could be summarized to a single page. Why waste time listening to the ahh ahem etc.

Notice that Youtube seems to be blocking many of the transcription web sites. Just trying to force you to watch all their infernal ads.