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

[Mike Schinkel]

Hi all: 


Now that it seems that rel="canonical" will make it into core, I've a question about how to best handle posts with paged comments. One option is to set the canonical URL to be the main post page that would include just the first set of comments but clearly the comments themselves are content and frequently we would like to see them indexed too. So what would be the best approach for this? As I ponder the options I can't come up with a good one, especially since Google doesn't like cloaked pages (i.e. one's that redirect for most people but not for Google's spiders.) 

Ideally if someone leaves a comment on page 2 with terms unique to other comments and also on in the post content that URL should show up somewhere in Google's index for those terms. 

Basically I'm just sending this email to hopefully trigger the discussion and/or to get a pointer to where it has already been discussed. 

-Mike Schinkel 
http://mikeschinkel.com/ 

P.S. It would seem what is also needed is for Google to recognize a <div rel="noindex"> so that for comment pages 2 thru "N" we could wrap the post content with that tag, no?