Indexing WP SEO Comments Pages

Comment on SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin by SEO Dave.

The Stallion SEO Super Comments option “Comment Posts Size” doesn’t have any impact on the dynamic creation of the SEO super comments pages, they are dynamically generated no matter what the “Comment Posts Size” is set to.

So they always exist when “SEO Comments ON**” is ticked even if you set “Comment Posts Size” to 99999999999 characters (I doubt any site has comments that big).

What the “Comment Posts Size” option does is set when the dynamic URLs are linked from the bottom right of the corresponding comment.

This comment is well over the character limit I use (I use 400), so this comment has the link, but even if this comment was one word the URL would still exist, but nothing would link to it, so search engines would have problems finding the URL (not impossible to find them).

If I increased the character limit to say 5,000 this comment would be too short and the link would be gone, but the dynamic URL would still exist and if Google can find it, it will spider and index it.

If you are finding URLs with format ?cid=### indexed in Google that show a blank SEO super comment page (no comment text) sounds like you’ve been deleting comments that had enough characters to have the SEO super comment link.

Will look like this stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-seo-super-comments-plugin/?cid=9999999999 (comment ID 9999999999 has never existed).

This is like a 404 error page, but I haven’t figured a way to turn it into an actual 404 error page. Ideally I’d have it 301 redirect to the main post (you could do this manually if you don’t like them indexed) or at least have a canonical to the main post (on my list of things to work on).

It’s not a major SEO issue, when you delete a comment Google will still try to spider the old dynamic URL for sometime, but as the internal links are gone over time it will stop spidering the deleted SEO super comment URLs.

In Stallion Responsive 8.2 (had my usual feature creep, release is imminent) I’ve added an override for the SEO Super Comments, every post can turn the SEO super comments links on/off. If you have posts that tend to have low quality comments or you just don’t want those comments linked to, you will be able to turn them off.

David

Update: Had a look at the deleted comments issue and think I’ve found a solution. Not fully tested yet, but looks like I have it set so when a comment ID doesn’t exist (comment deleted or never existed) the original WordPress post loads with the canonical URL to the original post, so Google will consider the URL stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-seo-super-comments-plugin/?cid=9999999999 for example as stallion-theme.co.uk/stallion-seo-super-comments-plugin/. Means give Google some time and the deleted URL version won’t be indexed in Google. Assuming I don’t find any issues with the fix will be part of Stallion 8.2 (on the verge of zipping it up and releasing it).