Site health warning for paginated comments

  • Resolved bobsled

    (@bobsled)


    3 years, 4 months ago

    I see that Yoast is recording a site health warning for paginated comments.

    I know there was some discussion about this a few years ago. Is this still regarded as a vital SEO issue by Yoast?

    With Core Web Vitals now a ranking factor, paginated comments really help reduce page loading time on posts with a lot of comments.

    So what is the current recommendation from Yoast?

Viewing 4 replies - 16 through 19 (of 19 total)
  • Thread Starter bobsled

    (@bobsled)

    I can see your point @roam92

    But when you remove the rel=canonical” directive, won’t you end up with duplicate content?

    My understanding is that if you use excerpt + link, Google can’t index the extra content because its crawler can’t click or scroll.

    How does your code snippet work to handle these issues?

    I’d love to find a solution, but I haven’t come across anything yet that works.

    I see that there has been no activity from Yoast on Github regarding this issue: https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/15809

    Perhaps @mazedulislamkhan could give us some feedback as to why Yoast is not taking any action on this issue.

    No, no duplicate content whatsoever on the comments pages. It’s very easy to avoid.

    As noted above, the GHPSEO plugin figured this out over a decade ago – here is a screenshot of the settings page it had:

    https://images2.imgbox.com/53/33/uXsP30ik_o.png

    As you can see, the main post content is replaced by an excerpt on all comments pages – so there are no issues with duplication or canonical, because each page (including comments) offers unique content and added value to your site.

    And yes, it would be indeed be helpful to hear from Yoast on this significant issue and why their plugin quietly drops your site’s pages on the floor.

    Thread Starter bobsled

    (@bobsled)

    I’m still using pagination with Yoast’s rel=canonical directive and I can see that GSC is indexing many of my comment pages. I can also see search queries from comments being indexed. So as far as I can tell, it works fine.

    That’s what I thought at first too, about my own site… I tested all those things and everything looked fine. But there’s a lag. After installing Yoast, it took a while for all my comments pages to be deindexed by Google and the site traffic to slowly drop off.

    Now that I’ve fixed Yoast with the code snippet which removes rel=canonical and the repeated post content, it’s taking a while for all those comments pages to come back.

    If the rel=canonical directive is in your paginated comments, then any search engine which properly follows the rules will not index those pages because they are considered duplicate and point to the main post:

    “URL is not on Google: This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. Alternate page with canonical tag.”

    https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls

Viewing 4 replies - 16 through 19 (of 19 total)
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