How to Stop Duplicate Content on WordPress Comments
Have you ever heard the Wrigley’s Doublemint gum commercial jingle? Wrigley’s commercials featured identical twins and the jingle with the lyrics, “Double your pleasure, Double your fun”. Doubling your fun with gum is great, but when it comes to search engines, having a double or duplicate page with identical content is not.
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms and website content management systems. Out of the box, it offers a great experience and is provides some search engine optimization features, but there are a number of things that you can do to boost its search engine optimization capabilities. One important aspect that should be addressed is that WordPress generates duplicate pages for comments. Google acknowledges that most duplicate content is not deceptive in origin, but is clear that duplicate content is bad for the user with:
However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is content in the form of text and images that appears on the Internet at more one address or URL. For example, http://www.yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html are two separate addresses, but have the exact same content on them. It is critical to provide one URL or address in the search engines for the best overall search experience.
How to check if your WordPress blog or website is generating duplicate content with comments
To find out if WordPress is generating duplicate pages with comments, go to Google and search for one of the following:
- If you have pretty links enabled, search for: site:yourdomain.com inurl:comment-page-1
- If you do not have pretty links enabled: site:yourdomain.com inurl:cpage
How to prevent WordPress from generating comment post duplicate content
- Login to your WordPress Dashboard.
- Go To Settings and locate: Discussion.
- On the Discussion Settings page, locate “Other comment settings”
- Uncheck the box next to: Break comments into pages with…
Take Away
WordPress is a robust and very popular CMS for blogging and websites. With a few minor changes, you can prevent duplicate content issues for page comments and avoid double or duplicate pages from being indexed in the search engines to provide for the best overall search engine experience. While Google does not consider duplicate content to be a basis for a penalty, the company may if that duplicate content appears to have been used in a deceptive manner to manipulate search results. Ultimately, is best to follow best practices and avoid duplicate content.
Great post Robin! After reading this I see that I need to go check this out for my blog and my client’s sites as well. Thanks!
Shannon,
Thank you! I’m glad to hearing that this article has been helpful.
~ Robin
Great post! I always love when I can learn something and you explain well what needs to be done to get rid of the duplicates. Now I’m heading to my WordPress settings to make sure the boxes are properly checked.
Simona, I’m glad to hear that you like the article. It is amazing how this one item can cause duplicate content – and problems – in the search engines. Please let me know if your settings were unchecked by default.
Thanks you!
This post has answered my problem. I am having several comments to my site and may not know if it’s all unique. Thanks for the heads up. I got my worries taken away.
Patrick,
I’m glad to hear that you found this helpful. Duplicate content is definitely something that we should all be striving to eliminate. Thanks for adding your thoughts.
~ Robin
Too bad this did not work i have duplicate content for comments on blog posts and its causing duplicate content issues with the page title being duplicated. I already had the option you mentioned unticked, anything else to try ?
Hi Mitch, just to be clear, are you having a problem with duplicate titles?