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

[Joost de Valk]

Both solution 5 & 6 won't work.

5 is cloaking, which is considered illegal by the search engines and  
I'd highly advise against it.

6 is not going to work: canonical is meant to distinguish the one  
"true" (canonical) version of a document from copies of it. Giving  
each comment its own page would make each comment completely different  
from the original article, and thus wouldn't work with the  canonical  
tag.

To be honest there's only one real solution: disabling paged comments  
altogether. Even using the canonical tag on sub pages with other  
comments is a lousy solution.

Cheers,
Joost


Joost de Valk

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 8, 2009, at 20:29, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at newclarity.net>  
wrote:

> 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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