Blackhole redirection option for Search Spam

[fippy]

Hi, like many others we have recently experienced our fair share of search spam targeting the core search functionality of WordPress (?s= & /search/). 300k+ requests in the last week or so.

The Yoast Crawl optimization options and most specifically the Internal site search cleanup options go some way to helping the issue. However, if possible it would be great to go further.

At the moment Yoast’s redirection of blocked searches automatically redirects to the homepage. There is no ability to set where this should redirect to. Might it be possible to specifiy the redirect page? This would be helpful as we could redirect spam requests to specified “blackhole” page and then potentially block their IP based on visiting that “blackhole” page; something easily achieved using Wordfence.

This would vastly reduce the number of spam requests hitting the server. Right now, allowing these requests to respond with the homepage uses vasts amount of resources and skews analytics.

N.B. as a side note it would also be nice to have a some transparency around the “common spam patterns” setting in Yoast to better understand what that filter might be doing?

[josevarghese]

Hi @fippy ,

Thank you for suggesting a new feature for one of our plugins! You are the first to have requested this feature asking to add an option to redirect the search spam to a page to create a black hole!

What's next? 
Our product team will assess feature requests in relation to other open bug reports and new features. Based on their assessment, the feature request will be given a priority level. Our developers work on the highest priority first. Unfortunately, this means we cannot give you an estimate if or when they'll start working on your request.

Thanks in advance.