Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I remove the ?replytocom variables in wordpress?
-
I'm using Yoast's wordpress plugin and there is an option to remove the replytocom variables. I'm curious what everyone's thoughts were on that, and if I should do it.
Here's the site if you need to see it.
Thanks!
-
Hey, guys, this is a very old post but because it might be useful to people in the future I thought I would update the URL that Ryan did a. great job posting but no longer goes to the correct place. No one can control what I third-party site changes there URL structure to rite?
you can use this plug-in called
?replytocom= replaced with #replytocom=
-
Mine is not indexed in the Google Search, but in Google Webmasters and SEOmoz they showed the error !
Should i remove those links via URL parameters ?
Not indexed, someone here told me some plugins are helping you, i have All-in seo plugin and removed the comluv plugin(for more spam in my blog). other plugins are like share social network That's it.
Any help for me and my blog will be much appreciated !
-
Thanks Ryan! Have a great 4th of July!
-
What do people not using this plug in do? I'm assuming not many people do this, right?
I presume they accept the WP default options. Our practice and understanding of SEO is what allows us to analyze and make decisions regarding tidbits such as the one you mentioned.
You think there is any benefit to doing it, or just one of those "hey why not" sort of things?
I do think there is a benefit. You are impacting a LOT of links. Every comment on your site. It may be a tiny 1% benefit type of thing, but the change applies site wide and will presumably be in place for years.
-
I''ll try to find the link where he talks about using pages instead of posts and share it. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I'll go ahead and select that option, thanks for your help. (On a side note, what do people not using this plug in do? I'm assuming not many people do this, right?)
You think there is any benefit to doing it, or just one of those "hey why not" sort of things?
-
Regarding the new pages instead of posts idea, do you have a link to share?
Regarding the comment url, the page with the comment should be fully indexed either way. By changing the link, you are helping search engines better understand your site. The comment links do not represent a new page or new information.
Google clearly understands WP sites exceptionally well. I am confident you can choose various options and they will still understand those links represent comments. With that said, I would still go with Yoast on this one.
Actually, SEOmoz does it too. Take a look at their blog comments.
-
Thanks for taking the time to check into it. One I'm concerned with is how this will effect long tail seo / indexing of the comments. How will this effect my organic traffic? (will it hurt it?)
I don't see these sorts of pages coming up in google now, so I'm not sure what selecting that option does (and how it effects the site.)
Yoast does a few things different with his site, and I don't always follow his lead. For example he suggets making new pages instead of new posts for your blog posts. He's the only one I've ever heard say this, or do this.
-
I just took a look at Yoast's site and I now better understand the option to remove the variables. I recommend selecting that option. From the Yoast site:
method remove_reply_to_com [line 939]
string remove_reply_to_com( string $link)
Removes the ?replytocom variable from the link, replacing it with a #comment- <number>anchor.</number> Tags: access: public Parameters: string $link The comment link as a string.
Example: http://yoast.com/user-contact-fields-wordpress/#comment-110294
-
hmm..thanks for the feedback. So do you suggest not blocking those? (and I'll message yoast also and see what his thoughts are.)
Thanks.
-
I understand the logic behind blocking removing the variables. They are a lot of extra links on the page which some webmasters might prefer to manage.
What I would prefer is to reform the link so it was something like: http://noahsdad.com/treadmill-training-progress#replytocom=22729
I am guessing the "respond" portion of the URL acts as if someone pressed the reply button which seems unnecessary. If someone clicks the link whether in search results or otherwise and is taken directly to the comment, they should be quite happy. If they wish to reply they can hit the reply button.
Google ignores anything after the # character in a URL. Therefore Google would see these as simply a link to the page which should already be indexed.
Perhaps you can ask Yoast about his thoughts.
-
Thanks for the kind words, I agree, he is a cutie.
Will blocking those cause the comments not to be indexed though?
-
Yup - removing those will save you the trouble of duplicate content - since Google by default is crawling those as different URLs. By default, if you have comments enabled, there's a link at the bottom of posts with that parameter in the url (the same as the blog post url - see here ---> http://noahsdad.com/treadmill-training-progress/?replytocom=22729#respond ).
Noah is cute!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Removing Toxic Back Links Targeting Obscure URL or Image
There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Default Wordpress 301 Redirects of JS and CSS files. Bad for SEO & How to Fix?
Hi there: We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with. The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Removing .html from URLs - impact of rankings?
Good evening Mozzers. Couple of questions which I hope you can help with. Here's the first. I am wondering, are we likely to see ranking changes if we remove the .html from the sites URLs. For example website.com/category/sub-category.html Change to: website.com/category/sub-category/ We will of course make sure we 301 redirect to the new, user friendly URLs, but I am wondering if anyone has had previous experience of implementing this change and how it has effected rankings. By having the .html in the URLs, does this stop link juice being flowed back to the root category? Second question: If one page can be loaded with and without a forward slash "/" at the end, is this a duplicate page, or would Google consider this as the same page? Would like to eliminate duplicate content issues if this is the case. For example: website.com/category/ and website.com/category Duplicate content/pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Wordpress Comments Pagination
Hi Mozzers What is your view on the following. Should you Paginate comments to increase page speed? If yes, at what # of comments would you begin pagination? (with the objective being decreasing page load times) Apply rel="canonical" back to the main article URL? eg: url/comment-page-1 => url noindex the comment pages? create a "View all" comments page? Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremycabral
J0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Wordpress blog in a subdirectory not being indexed by Google
HI MozzersIn my websites sitemap.xml, pages are listed, such as /blog/ and /blog/textile-fact-or-fiction-egyptian-cotton-explained/These pages are visible when you visit them in a browser and when you use the Google Webmaster tool - Fetch as Google to view them (see attachment), however they aren't being indexed in Google, not even the root directory for the blog (/blog/) is being indexed, and when we query:site: www.hilden.co.uk/blog/ It returns 0 results in Google.Also note that:The Wordpress installation is located at /blog/ which is a subdirectory of the main root directory which is managed by Magento. I'm wondering if this causing the problem.Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!AnthonyToTOHuj.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tone_Agency0 -
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
Hello Everyone! I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines. The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process). Does anyone have a solution? Thanks, Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alloydigital0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0