Since the release of WordPress 2.7, businesses, marketers and bloggers face another duplicate content issue with comment pagination.
By default, WordPress 2.7 will split comments into pages everytime it reaches 50. Obviously this is a good feature to reduce the web page loading time if there hundreds or thousands of comments and improve user experience.
Unfortunately, it is a nightmare for all bloggers as it has the possibility to create duplicate content. What happen is that as a page number of comments grows, a page accumulates an increasing number of pages at which it can be accessed. For example, if you have 152 comments for a blog post, then you will 5 different URLs for just a single post content.
http://www.example.com/test-blog-post/
http://www.example.com/test-blog-post/comment-page-1/
http://www.example.com/test-blog-post/comment-page-2/
http://www.example.com/test-blog-post/comment-page-3/
http://www.example.com/test-blog-post/comment-page-4/
Each of the page above has the same blog post content. The only difference is the comments themselves, which is far less important from a search engine optimization perspective. It is a disaster for all of us as we can lose all our search engine traffic overnight if search engines has found out duplicate content.
Don’t panic! There are solutions for comment pagination duplicate content issue. Please read on.
#1 Turning Off Comment Pagination
You can turn off comment pagination and it will solve your duplicate content issue. But I belive most of you won’t do it because it is a grest feature. Continue to read alternative solution if you are not choosing this option. In case you want to turn off the pagination feature, you can go to Settings -> Discussion in your WordPress dashboard.
#2 Specifying Canonical Links
Google has released a new canonical link tag recently to resolve duplicate content issue for web pages. You an read one of my previous post about fixing duplicate content with canonical links. Basically this is a straightforward yet effective solution.
For all WordPress blog owners, I have a good news for you. I have created a WordPress plugin, No Duplicate Content. This plugin is written to automatically generate canonical link tag for all blog post. It should be the easiest solution for you without touching any code.
Conclusion
Although pagination comments create duplicate content issue and make us headache, we can still use it without sacrificing search engine optimization by just implementing canonical links in our blog post.
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Another option not listed it to block those pages using htaccess – just as you would to block “tag” and “category” pages.
@Kristof,
Yes, you are right, htaccess is a good way to block those duplicate comment pages.
I use canonical meta tag. It is very nice and best for SEO.
how to fix this issue, you did not said it yet ?
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