Hi

the theme i used has a search function on the header top, the code is something like this

<form role="search" method="get" class="search-form" action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>">
<label>
<span class="screen-reader-text"><?php echo esc_html_x( 'Search for:', 'label', 'gridbox' ); ?></span>
<input type="search" class="search-field"
placeholder="<?php echo esc_attr_x( 'Search …', 'placeholder', 'gridbox' ); ?>"
value="<?php echo esc_html( get_search_query() ); ?>" name="s"
title="<?php echo esc_attr_x( 'Search for:', 'label', 'gridbox' ); ?>" />
</label>
<button type="submit" class="search-submit">
<?php echo gridbox_get_svg( 'search' ); ?>
<span class="screen-reader-text"><?php echo esc_html_x( 'Search', 'submit button', 'gridbox' ); ?></span>
</button>
</form>

Also I have yoast schema graph json-LD installed (just a bit of part of the generated schema code)

@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://example.com/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}]

I run site audit using sitebulp desktop and this warning triggered

URL contains a form with a GET method

URLs that contain a form element with the method set to GET, which creates submission URLs with the form data in the query string. This presents a potential vulnerability for a large number of URLs to be created and/or cached, which could cause issues with crawl efficiency or index bloat

i have like 100 posts but excluded index coverage reach 10K most of them are url with parameter...sample url

https://example.com/page/3?s={search_term_string}/page/7/page/10/page/2/page/10/page/10/page/10/page/3/page/10

https://example.com/tag/egg?s=search_term_string

https://example.com/?s={search_term}/page/10

https://example.com/page/8?s=/page/1

my question is

does my excluded coverage is caused by the search form and schema JSON above?

does blocking robot with Disallow: /*?* is the correct approach?

if using Disallow: /*?*, what about url that has already been indexed since robots will not be able to access

should i modified the search function into something lik this (add nofollow rel)

<form role="search" method="get" class="search-form" rel="nofollow" action="<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>">

is there any alternative solution aside from using robots.txt

my apologize for my english

[edited by: phranque at 11:51 pm (utc) on May 5, 2022]
[edit reason] exemplified urls [/edit]