I have a website that's getting a lot of traffic to URLs that aren't intended to be viewable pages, and having checked this on a couple of other wordpress sites I manage, it seems to be a default part of Wordpress.

The URLs in question are: https://mycustomdomain.com/page/N/

We're experiencing a lot of bot traffic going to those addresses and are not sure why.

To mitigate this I have:

- introducing a WAF rule in Cloudflare to block visits (http.request.uri.path wildcard r"/page/*")

- added nginx rules to return a 404 on those URLs

I'm also trying to look into where these are coming from and why the site in question is seeing so many visits to these URLs.

I put the Cloudflare rule in place this morning (2-3 hours before writing this) and according to Cloudflare the rule has been triggered 8,430 times since I created it!

AFTER MORE INVESTIGATION:

So I believe that the issue is being created somehow by pagination / query loop.

I have a query loop on the page which returns posts. The pagination block for this returns pages past the initial 10 with the following URL structure:

https://mycustomdomain.com?query-7-page=2

I don't know why this is the URL convention rather than:

https://mycustomdomain.com/page/2