WordPress 2.7 Creates Duplicate Content by Default

By default, WordPress 2.7 enables comment pagination which creates duplicate content. The comment pagination feature in WordPress 2.7, breaks comments into multiple pages so it can speed up the loading process of pages. This feature is enabled by default and is set to allow 50 comments before the page break. The big issue here is that with this new feature enabled, your blog is creating duplicate title tags, duplicate descriptions and this could have an negative impact of your search engine rankings and pagerank.

One simple way to find out if your blog is creating duplicate content, is to access your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you do not have a Webmaster Tools account setup, I strongly suggest that you take advantage of these free tools and create an account. Simply login to your webmaster tools account and select the Domain you wish to check from the dashboard. Next, select Diagnostics and then navigate to Content analysis, if there are any issues with the content of your pages it will be displayed here.

The following is an example of just one of several "duplicate content" issues that were discovered when checking my Google Webmaster Tools account:

* Pages with duplicate meta descriptions:
Have bioengineering scientists taken technology too far?
/off-the-mouse-wall/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-its-a-genpet/‎
/off-the-mouse-wall/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-its-a-genpet/comment-page-1/‎

* Pages with duplicate title tags:
You Have Got to Be Kidding, Right, it's a GenPet? - Madmouse Blog - Ethical Blogging Tips
/off-the-mouse-wall/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-its-a-genpet/‎
/off-the-mouse-wall/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-its-a-genpet/comment-page-1/‎

Duplicate content seems to be a top issue with many of the search engines, mainly Google. Now, you may ask yourself, is this going to be a big problem? There is no way of actually telling how the search engines may react to this, but why take any chances when there are a couple of easy solutions to work around this issue.

* You can simply shut the break comments off, just un-check the following box in your dashboard>settings>discussion tab.

* You could add a statement in your robots.txt file to exclude comment pagination from the Google Search Engine if you wanted to enable it for faster page loading.

* WordPress installed in root directory:
Disallow: /comment-page-*/

* WordPress installed in a sub-directory:
Disallow: /blog/comment-page-*/

- - For other search engines, you could do the following - -

* WordPress installed in root directory:
Disallow: /comment-page/

* WordPress installed in a sub-directory:
Disallow: /blog/comment-page/

If your WordPress install sub-directory isn't named "blog", then change it to the appropriate name.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, - - WordPress 2.7 Creates Duplicate Content by Default - -

Spunky Jones.

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