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Since wp 2.7, wordpress has introduced the paginated comments feature. I've read that this may not be good for SEO as the main content gets "duplicated" on the pages of the comments.

Then I've read that to prevent this, we can specify the canonical URL in meta tags.

Now i've checked the source of my page and a canonical url is automatically added and reads like this on the pages of the comment:

<link rel='canonical' href='http://localhost/wp16/?p=3657' /> 

So am I cool? I shouldn't worry about dup content? This is actually from the twentyten theme and I am not sure if this feature (the showing up of the canonical meta) was recently added or was always there.


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1 Answer 1

Don't worry about the duplicated content issue. First of all, the canonical link fixes most browsers and search engine crawlers that will be reading your site (and it's actually been there for a while).

Second, the alleged "duplicate content penalty" that people have told you about (the things you've read that say it's bad for SEO) is a myth. Google developers have been quoted repeatedly as saying so. Here's a great article that references them and explains it in more detail than I care to go into.

So yes, you're fine. Don't worry about paginated comments on your site. They actually make the experience better for the user and don't harm your SEO score.

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I disagree a bit on experience. For my taste in most cases pagination of comments is overused and pages are too small. Just like with pagination of content the benefit from pagination has to be very considerable to offset the poor experience of pagination in general. –  Rarst Mar 15 '11 at 22:38
+1 Rarst - I find paginating them a pain to read - I wanna flick through them NOW! Unless it's done well, such as YouTube's AJAX'ed comment pages. –  TheDeadMedic Mar 16 '11 at 0:44
It's all a matter of personal preference. But the OP was asking about the potential SEO impact of paginated comments, not about whether or not they were a good idea on principle. Unless you have more than 50 comments on a page, there's no real reason to split them out over multiple pages. –  EAMann Mar 16 '11 at 0:51
I thought it was worth my 2p. Admittedly off-topic, but I think it's worth discussing sideline issues to the main question. –  TheDeadMedic Mar 16 '11 at 2:40
I see! Thanks for clearing it up! –  John Mar 16 '11 at 4:28

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