Wordpress comment pagination & duplicate content 6
Wordpress version 2.7 has comment pagination - so that pages with 00s of comments only display, say, 50 at a time - built into it (the functionality is built in - you still need to make a load of amends to your theme to get it to work. More on that another time ...).
But it has a problem. (Update: See later post with solution to duplicate content on paginated comments).
Duplicate content
Comment pagination is likely to lead to issues with duplicate content in google - the paginated comments will have the same titles and meta descriptions. Google will see them as identical and therefore discount all but one of them. For instance, compare this page and this page - same titles, same meta description, same post at the top - but different URLs and different comments.
So if your comments are useful from an SEO point of view, I wouldn't use comment pagination (you can turn it off, or set the number of posts per page to be very high).
Sorting out pagination, meta descriptions and titles
This is already a problem with the standard wordpress loop - pages 2 or higher of a category, tag or whatever are already often seen as duplicate content.
My unique meta descriptions for wordpress method doesn't solve this problem. But then what does - all in one seo pack doesn't either.
There's a possible solution to this - if wordpress gave an option to automatically append '- page X' on the titles and meta descriptions of any paginated page. It's just wordpress doesn't let you do that.
So until something like that is introduced, I'll see if I can find anyone with a work around and report back. Or if you've got one, post it here.
And I'll try not to rise to the bait of anyone pointing out that I don't have enough comments on any posts for it to be a problem ...
You might also like
- Avoid duplicate content with paged comments in wordpress
- Can you use rel = canonical to fix duplicate comment problems caused by comment pagination in wordpress?
- Adding page numbers: How to avoid duplicate titles and meta descriptions in pages 2 and higher of Wordpress category and tag pages
- Unique meta description and meta keyword tags in your Wordpress themes
- 29 easy ways to fine tune your blog
Check out Platinum SEO plugin. It has an option for this.
Although Platinum SEO does have a new workaround for this, it does it by noindexing the pages of comments. This isn't very satisfactory either, as it tells google to ignore the pages of content altogether rather than actually fixing the problem.
Hi Malcolm,
Thanks for visiting my blog while moderating my comment.
Then, you do not have any other option than turning comment pagination off.
Meanwhile, I came here for unique meta description code of yours but somehow the code didn't fit my blog. Then I ended up with the plugin HeadSpace2.
With HeadSpace2 and All In One Seo, I have now unique meta description for every post, page, subpage, tag, author page, category and archive. Browse my blog and see my source codes. I'm trying with Google to index every page of mine and with less pages in supplemental index, as a research to increase traffic to my blog. Earlier I was allowing only home page, posts and pages to be indexed and the traffic was less. I was blocking robots earlier to index archives, categories, subpages etc., with robots meta tags.
Hey, Raj. Let me know what didn't work and I'll see if I can fix it for others - I've had it work on about 7 worpdress themes with no problems. The key thing is to remember to set up a custom field called metadescription - if you don't do that, you won't get any meta description tag on your posts.