[wp-hackers] Canonical & Best Practices for Paged Comment

[Mike Schinkel]

"Otto" <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the idea behind 
> the rel=canonical and what it actually does and/or is used for. 
> Having a canonical link in your header does not stop Google from 
> indexing the page. It controls the URL that Google displays for 
> search results.

Since you made that statement when quoting my email I'll just state that I completely know what rel="canonical" is used for; I studied that and related issues for 6 months back in 2006/07 (see: http://blog.welldesignedurls.org)  

What I don't quite get yet it how to solve the duplicate content problem with paged comment assuming WP's comments are not significantly re-architected.

> So your comments would still be indexed. 

I think you may be wrong on this. I think that it is likely that google will request the canonical URL and index that one.  If not, then I can see how rel="canonical" could become a haven for spammers.  Imagine someone specifying that their root is the canonical for thousands of pages...

-Mike Schinkel
http://mikeschinkel.com/