[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #10550: nofollow attribute added to comment_reply_link function

[WordPress Trac]

#10550: nofollow attribute added to comment_reply_link function
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 Reporter:  seo-dave      |       Owner:            
     Type:  defect (bug)  |      Status:  new       
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  Unassigned
Component:  Comments      |     Version:            
 Severity:  minor         |    Keywords:            
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Comment(by seo-dave):

 noindex wouldn't be suitable since you do want the main content of what
 the reply to links point to, yes the content is theoretically duplicate,
 (same page with a different URL) the major search engines normally combine
 the results of duplicate URLs, meaning it's not a problem to have these
 links without a nofollow attribute. I've had it running this way on one of
 my sites for well over a month and some of the pages have 100s of comments
 and the site is doing very well in Google (2,000+ unique visitors a day,
 most from Google).

 The site in question has about 2,000 post with about 650 pages indexed in
 Google. The site in total has 2,600+ approved comments so that's a LOT of
 those reply to links. A search of the 600+ indexed pages turns up three
 pages that are indexed with the reply links, they have the url structure
 with the replytocom variable within it, though all three pages also are
 indexed normally and checking the main search phrase (title of the page)
 finds the original pages listed in Google, not the extra pages. For one of
 the pages the url corresponded to a paginated comments pages as well, so
 like this

 domain.com/post-name.html/comment-page-2?replytocom=12345

 So on my site Google is combining 2,600+ links into the original URLs and
 only partially failing in three instances.

 From an SEO perspective there is no harm in principle in having multiple
 links back to the page the links are on, so having 50+ reply to comment
 links isn't a problem in itself**

 ** Although this isn't really the place to discuss this: I've done a lot
 of SEO research over the last 10 years or so and the anchor text of links
 is considered much more important than standard body text, so having 50+
 links with the anchor text "reply to this comment" is potentially damaging
 from an SEO perspective since it "waters down" the SEO benefits of the
 other anchor text on the page (which hopefully will have some keywords in
 them). This is true whether a nofollow attribute is used or not since the
 anchor text is indexed either way. In an ideal situation all anchor text
 would support the SERPs of the page the links are on, this is why I would
 like to edit the Reply to comment text and change it to something like

 "Reply to this comment on post name"

 By doing this we've added relevant keywords to that anchor text, that is
 assuming the title of the post contains relevant keywords. I've done this
 with other WordPress functions and it works quite well.

 David Law

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10550#comment:2>
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