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

[Mike Schinkel]

Using rel="canonical" and then setting up a page that displays each  
comment by itself with a link back to its post to pass pagerank is a  
6th solution.

-Mike Schinkel
WordPress Custom Plugins
http://mikeschinkel.com/custom-wordpress-plugins/


On Nov 8, 2009, at 11:17 AM, William Canino wrote:

> 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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