Managing comments on your WordPress website can be quite a bit of a hassle.
This is especially true when you have an ultra-popular blog and get tons of engagement from the audience.
Such engagements lead to many comments, with some being detailed, sometimes taking up multiple hundreds of words spread across several paragraphs.
Future users may be unable to access the comment section or reach your footer area, where you may have other important links.
And while WordPress comes with the solution to this problem via what’s called “paginated comments.”
Paginated comments are your comment section spread across several pages.
But what can occur when you paginate your comments is that your content gets duplicated.
That’s because while the comments will change upon clicking another page, the next set of comments will also be related to the same article.
The same content on two different pages (in Google’s eyes) can damage your SEO standing.
Here’s how you can avoid duplicate content with paginated comments.
One way is via manual coding.
The way to do that is to provide a meta tag to every page.
Below is a look at how the code typically appears.
<meta link rel=“canonical” href=“nameofyoursite.com/original-post/” />
Adding a meta tag to a limited number of pages is pretty straightforward.
But as your site grows, it’ll be hard for you or your teams to put these tags in manually.
Fortunately, SEO plugins are available to sort this mess out for you (Yoast and All in One SEO are two of the best).
With the default Canonical URL options in both the tools, you’re good to go.
A canonical URL is a URL that Google knows is the one that matters.
Your SEO plugin will point the links generated when moving from page to page of the comments section to one canonical URL (by default, your post’s link).
Google then doesn’t crawl the comments pages or treat them uniquely because it knows they’re just duplicates.
