[wp-hackers] SEO, How to turn off paged comments for search engine crawlers?

William Canino william.canino at googlemail.com
Sun Nov 8 19:17:09 UTC 2009


Paged comments introduce two SEO problems:

1. the article appears as duplicate content across several URLs
2. the pagerank is diluted across several URLs.

Four people have suggested solutions to this:

1. have all but the main permalink show an excerpt of the post,
2. add meta noindex nofollow to pages with older comments
3. add " - comment page $cpage" to the titles of pages with paged comments
4. hack paginate_comments_links, previous_comments_link() and
next_comments_link() to add the nofollow tag

Comments contain precious content sometimes. and it's a shame if the
search engines can't find and point to them.

I am thinking of a fifth solution, and would like your opinion.

5. only if useragent is a search engine crawler,
  a. turn off comment paging on the main permalink
  a. 301 redirect the pages with older comments to the main permalink,
yet maintaining the #comment-id.

Which one do you think would work best?

W


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