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

[Hendry Lee]

> On Feb 18, 2009, at 9:33 AM, Stephen Rider <wp- 
> hackers at striderweb.com> wrote:
>
>> On Feb 17, 2009, at 11:29 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
>>
>>>> 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...
>>
>> "indexed" != "counted toward pagerank"

On Feb 18, 2009, at 10:37 AM, mikeschinkel at newclarity.net wrote:

> Of course, but are you sure that is the case here?

> No, but unless someone on this list a) works for Google, and b) is  
> giving away corporate secrets, nobody else does either.
> 
> It just seemed that some people were conflating the two.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I still find this can be a haven for spammers.

Pages are still indexed as usual, but Google offers the one tagged as
canonical in the search result.

What if a spammer refer to the home page as the canonical version, for
thousands of pages?

As quoted in this document:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.ht
ml

"Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are
transferred as well."

Will the canonical attribute sends PR of thousands of pages to the homepage?

I'm sure Google has come up with a filter to determine what constitutes
unique content. And if there's a penalty to this, a two-paragraph post with
multiple pages of comments will cause problems because there are more unique
content than duplicates.

Someone brought this up earlier, will search users be able to find the
content in the comments or get lost because they are always offered the
first page?

As I said earlier, this is just one SEO problem that WP may or may not want
to solve in the core. And if there is a reason to fix this one, there should
be really good reason to do so.

-Hendry