[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #8297: Comment Paging leads to duplicated URLs for the same content

[WordPress Trac]

#8297: Comment Paging leads to duplicated URLs for the same content
----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  wnorris   |       Owner:              
     Type:  defect    |      Status:  new         
 Priority:  normal    |   Milestone:  2.7         
Component:  Comments  |     Version:  2.7         
 Severity:  major     |    Keywords:  dev-feedback
----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
 In order to optimize for search engines, each unique resource on the web
 should have a single canonical URL for that resource, and any others
 should redirect to the canonical URL.  This concept was added in WordPress
 core some time ago.  The new comment paging feature in 2.7 causes problems
 with this to varying degrees.

 With comment paging turned on:
   - the main post URL and the highest numbered comment page URL result in
 the exact same data.  Perhaps the comment page should redirect to the main
 post URL?
   - comment page numbers can go infinitely high, resulting in the post
 being displayed with no comments.  Perhaps numbers that are two high
 should redirect to the highest legitimate comment page?

 With comment paging turned off:
   - comment page numbers can always be appended to the URL, which displays
 the post with all comments (the same thing as if you hadn't specified a
 comment page number at all).  When paging is turned off, any requests that
 specify a page number should *always* redirect to the canonical URL for
 the post (would this cause unforseen problems?).

 The root of this problem is the fact that comment paging is accomplished
 by modifying the URL, rather than adding a query parameter.  I'm sure
 there was some reasoning for this (perhaps dealing with caching?), but it
 results in multiple URLs which all contain (at least much of) the same
 content.

 I haven't dug into the code for this yet, as I wanted to get some feedback
 first.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8297>
WordPress Trac <http://trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress blogging software