Site health warning for paginated comments

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Thanks @mazedulislamkhan

I read the thread and it seems like a toss-up. But for me, I look at it from a user’s perspective. Scrolling through 100’s of comments isn’t user-friendly, and it slows down page loading.

So I’ll stick with pagination and ignore the Yoast SEO site health warning.

I noticed at the end of the thread on Github there is a feature request to remove the warning. Hopefully, this will happen at some point.

We have checked, and having pagination on does indeed speed up page loading, particularly on mobile, which is apparently very important these days, but so is SEO and page rankings. Then you have the argument for not allowing any comments at all….

So yes, it seems like a major toss up, but we are going to leave pagination on and will see what happens on our non-monetised hobby blog as we don’t really have anything to lose. Hopefully by the time it starts earning us money we’ll know for sure what the best course of action is. Until then I’m going to get on with other things and will ignore the Yoast warning. I’ve hidden the dashboard widget and I spend very little time in Site Health anyway as that area is for WordPress newbies, and other plugin authors are also hijacking it now.

Much like driving my car, I know what various noises mean, I don’t need a computer to tell me what’s wrong ??

Yes, speed is improved @sean-h

The one factor I was worried about was losing some ranking keywords that were coming from comments.

But I can’t see any losses on Google Search Console month on month. So all I can conclude is that pagination and canonical pages work fine for SEO.

Thanks for your clarification, @bobsled. It’s completely fine to ignore the warning showing by Yoast SEO when you know for sure what you’re doing ??

As you have already said, “it’s a toss-up”. If you want that warning to be removed from the plugin, I recommend you to submit your thoughts on the relevant GitHub issue as well as this will help our development team to find out to prioritizing this and making the right decision for everyone.

Have a great fantastic day!

Thanks, @mazedulislamkhan

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by bobsled.

@bobsled & @sean-h –

Be very very careful here. The Yoast SEO plugin will harm your site’s SEO if you use paged comments. And they don’t make this apparent – certainly not in the mild recommendation on the Site Health screen, which does not warn you what truly will happen…

For all comments pages, Yoast adds a “rel=canonical” directive pointing back to the main page in order to avoid a duplicate content penalty, but this is the wrong solution. The result is that all WordPress sites which do use comments pagination will end up with most of their comments being completely ignored by Google.

All comments not on the main canonical page will never be indexed by search engines, thus defeating the point and value of having all that unique content in the first place.

For all pages past the first page, Google Search Console will return “URL is not on Google: This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. Alternate page with canonical tag.”

And poof, gone – all those comments fall into a black hole, never to be indexed again.

This happened to my site with 47,500 comments, and I’m only now realizing what went wrong and why the traffic fall-off…

@roam92

We turned pagination off again. I think the most comments we have on a single article is about 100, so paginating that is pretty pointless, me thinks. Upon further testing, I notice no difference in speed.

@sean-h

That’s good. You really can’t afford to have WordPress’ comments pagination turned on and use Yoast – because the way Yoast is implemented, all your comments past the main page will be totally ignored by Google and other search engines…

My site has some posts with thousands of comments, so it’s different. And of course all those older comments have significant long-tail search and relevance value that hurts any site to lose.

@roam92

Right. But how is speed affected on a post with 1000’s of comments? What do you do in that case?

I’ll check more deeply later @roam92

But I just did a quick check and GSC shows some of my paginated comments pages as indexed and on Google. They appear in indexed but not submitted in sitemap.

So Google does index them. But I’ll have to do a deeper check to see how many and if any that are not indexed have affected the ranking of the pages.

Thanks for reminding me to revisit this issue.

After a thorough check, I can see that Google is not indexing most paginated comment pages. However, it is indexing some.

It hasn’t caused any loss of traffic, but I can see that some high-ranking keywords from comments have disappeared.

I changed to paginated comments to help page loading speed. But it was only one of many measures.

So I guess the only way to go now is to try removing the pagination.

Currently, my Core Web Vitals are all green for mobile and desktop.

So if the change results in an increase in page loading speed, I should notice quite quickly and can revert.

But it will take longer to discover if Google re-ranks the keywords from comments.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by bobsled.

@bobsled

Thanks for the update. Every comments page I checked on my site was deindexed. At first I hadn’t realized it, because there was a delay in Google doing this across the board. So it takes time to drop out everywhere, and there may be a delay.

There is no technical reason for some pages to be indexed and some not, because the devastating “rel=canonical” rule that Yoast inserts is the same for all comments pages – and Google will treat them consistently.

It’s along similar lines to what’s described here:

https://moz.com/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

So, what to do? I checked a couple other SEO plugins and they also failed at handling WordPress paginated comments properly. The plugin I’d used previously – GHPSEO – handled this correctly. The proper approach is to remove the duplicate post content on comments pages and replace it with an excerpt + link, while leaving all the unique comment content intact and indexable, with no “rel=canonical” being added.

So I wrote a code snippet that borrows from the codebase of the (unfortunately discontinued) GHPSEO plugin. It’s 25 lines of code that fixes Yoast SEO and handles paged comments properly. I’m now waiting for all those hundreds of pages to be reindexed by Google, but it will take some time.

Bottom line, I don’t understand why Yoast doesn’t get this right. It’s simple to understand and easy to do. They make big loud promises about improving your site’s SEO and content visibility – but in the case of paged comments, they actually destroy it! It’s inexcusable.

Well, I tried @roam92

But removing pagination severely affected page loading and CWV scores. On average, down from 99 to 81 for mobile due to a huge DOM.

I have had a terrific traffic boost since I got all my pages to pass CWV for mobile and desktop.

But recovering a handful of ranking keywords generated by user comments isn’t going to help at all if it means much slower loading.

So okay, it’s not perfect. But I’m staying with pagination.

@bobsled

I don’t endorse removing comments pagination, and I have not removed pagination on my own site. As noted above, I have some posts with over 1,000 comments!

What I’m saying is that using the Yoast SEO plugin, as currently implemented, will result in the deindexing of all comments pages past the first one. For my site with nearly 50,000 comments, that is a ton of unique content that Google dropped since I installed Yoast.

But there’s no good reason for Yoast to do this, so I wrote a code snippet to fix it and keep the pagination while restoring the indexing of all comments pages by removing the duplicate content and the harmful “rel=canonical” directive. This way, my pages load fast plus I keep all my content. Hopefully, as time passes and these pages are reindexed, my site traffic will return.

The point of my posts above are to warn people of what Yoast will do to your site if you use WordPress’ paginated comments, because Yoast definitely isn’t telling you this – and I sure wish I’d known it! Hopefully, Yoast will do the right thing and fix their plugin to handle paginated comments properly.