How Wordpress Makes Comments SEO Unfriendly

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How Wordpress Makes Comments SEO Unfriendly

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Titan Quest Forum	Nintendo Wii	Graphics Forum
Halo 3 Forum	Mac Software

By: Michael Gray
2007-08-03

I love wordpress I really do it makes it really easy to publish, however the wordpress developers really need some help sometimes. It seems when there is a choice to make things SE friendly more often than not they make worst choice possible.

Case and point lets use one of my favorite test subjects Matt Cutts. Lets take a look at this SERP for example.

The one that concerns me the bottom one www.mattcutts.com/blog/harry-potter-font-looks-like-yahoo-logo/feed/

For every post wordpress generates a comment feed url. Why does this matter? Well Google will index these feed URLs and up until a day or two ago these would be labeled supplemental. From Googles perspective it makes sense, because comment feeds are distinct URLs and 99% of the time dont get links. Why is that a problem well without a critical mass of authority/trust, sites having a large amount of supplemental pages is considered a negative indicator and a gets a subsequent ranking drop/filter.

To make things worse theres no easy way to get into wordpress and fix the problem. You cant specify a different permalink folder for feed comments without hacking the core wordpress files. You cant add a noindex meta tag either. So why not block the feed folder using robots? The majority of people publish feeds under http://example.com/feed/ so using robots keeps your comment feeds from being indexed also blocks your main site feed, not the desired scenario.

So how do we fix it? First Google give us back the supplemental indicator, its a diagnostic tool, and dont suggest the two step workaround: Google Dumps The Supplemental Results Label

First, get a list of all of your pages. Next, go to the webmaster console -Google Webmaster Central- and export a list of all of your links. Make sure that you get both external and internal links, and concatenate the files. Now, compare your list of all your pages with your list of internal+external backlinks. If you know a page exists, but you dont see that page in the list of site with backlinks, that deserves investigation. Pages with very few backlinks (either from other sites or internally) are also worth checking out.You dont improve things by making them harder. Secondly wordpress get an SEO consultant on board to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot on a regular basis. Try looking at your blog and see if the comment feeds are getting indexed, if they are Id suggest biting the bullet and blocking all feeds, not ideal, but clearly the lesser of two evils.

Comments

Tag: SEO, Wordpress

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About the Author:
Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org.