Problem with the modal popup and mobile login

[adrian]

adrian

August 26, 2020 at 12:31 pm

Both Google Search Console and Ahrefs SEO audits are showing thousands of wp-login crawled URLs. I had a developer log into this and his conclusion is that your login modal is creating this.

I’ve attached 2 screenshots from the developer from the Chrome Dev with the trouble code.

Report with all the trouble redirect links *Login to see link – they all have the same format

While blocking from robots works for indexing it doesn’t fully solve the problem. It’s a neverending SEO debate but each link on a page is leaking page rank even if it’s nofollow or blocked by robots. Also, there not just a few links but it appears to generate a lot more links with parameters than the number of site pages.

Please let me know if this is something that can be fixed.

His full comments below:

The cause of the problem:
I checked the results appearing in the file what you attached, and I assume the problem is caused by that you are displaying the login form and the social buttons in a popup form.

The duplicated /wp-login.php and /oauth-redirect-uri pages are looking like this:

*Login to see link
*Login to see link

and if you inspect the Source URLs in these 2 cases they are:
*Login to see link

Nextend Social Login redirects the users back to the same page where the social button was pressed. This is handled over the “redirect” parameter, that as you can see contains the URL encoded url of the current page, where you are currently located at – see attachment: nsl-redirect-link.JPG.

So if you are on different pages, the Target URL will be different as well, as the redirect parameter will contain the URL of the current page, this is why Google may also think that it is completely new Target URL.

However without passing the url with the redirect url of the social buttons, we wouldn’t be able to redirect the users back to the same page where the person pressed the social button.

The same thing happens with your mobile menu, too where you have a “Log In” menu point. If you inspect the URL of the link, it contains the URL of the current page in the redirect_to parameter, that WordPress use to handle redirects by default.