Google search reveals unwanted password reset text on homepage

[iamandyogden]

Whilst checking my sites entry on Google, I clicked to view the text-only version of the cached page.

Before even the name of my site, the following text appears on the page:-

Password Reset

Please enter your e-mail address. You will receive a new password via e-mail.

Email:

After confirming that a basic WordPress site didn’t include this, I began searching through my plugins and eventually found this text within the ‘wp-eMemberlangeng.php’ file of the eMember plugin. (also 4 other languages, but my site is in English)

The homepage doesn’t contain any protected content and so I don’t want this text to appear at all. Can this be easily removed without breaking password related functionality on pages that need it?

Thanks

Andy

[wzp]

What you are seeing is the “cached” image of a dynamically rendered home page, at the time Google was crawling your site. At the time of that particular “crawl,” Google requested your home page, in such a manner, so that the resulting output contained that text. You can see what Google sees by pulling up any page on your browser, and selecting “View Source.”

I suspect that; at the time, Google pulled up your home page in a way that caused that text to appear. Maybe it crawled the login link, which triggered a failed login screen…

You don’t have to worry about that particular cached page. It poses no security threat.

[wzp]

P.S. If the thought of seeing that cached page really bothers you, you can use Google’s webmaster tools to remove it from the search results…

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734

However, since WordPress pages are dynamically rendered, that particular (failed login text) page may be recrawled at a future date.

[iamandyogden]

Thanks for the detailed response

My reason for questioning it was that the text appeared on the cached version of the homepage, so I thought it may have been contributing towards the crawl and effecting my page ranking.

If that’s not the case I guess I needn’t worry

[wzp]

Any crawl is better than being ignored…

[Author]

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