Today my buddy Sander pointed out that he suddenly had pages showing as noindex,nofollow when he ran a spider across a site. A bit more researching learned us that WordPress automatically adds a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag to each URL that has ?replytocom in it. At first I (wrongly) thought this was new to WordPress 3.5, but it turns out to be the default behavior for quite a while already. All the more reason to tell you about it:
What are these ?replytocom links?
Most blogs these days have threaded commenting enabled, which means that you can reply to every comment by clicking on that comments reply link. This is very neat to keep the conversations together and a feature I deeply love. This feature normally works with javascript, but because of accessibility, there is also a fallback option. If you don’t have javascript enabled, or, if you’re a bot, you’re not capable of handling it, you’ll see links that look as follows:
http://www.example.com/example-post/?replytocom=1
This would force reload the page and give you the option to reply to the comment with ID 1. I absolutely hate that fallback link. On a site like this one, with often over a hundred comments on a post, it means there are 100 links pointing to that same article, causing a lot of crawling that’s totally unneeded. For this reason I added the option in my SEO plugin to remove it, which you’ll find under SEO → Permalinks:
So what does this noindex,nofollow do?
Unfortunately, the robots meta tag WordPress adds essentially makes every URL with
?replytocom in it a dead end street. Because of the nofollow bit of the robots meta tag it adds, if say, Mashable would link to a URL with replytocom in it, my site wouldn’t actually benefit from that link. Doing nothing is much better: the rel="canonical" link element on the page, that points to the clean version, would tell search engines to use that clean version.
This is the reason why, when I found out, I immediately released version 1.3.3 of my WordPress SEO plugin that removes that noindex,nofollow line. I’ve also opened a trac ticket, we’ll see what happens with that. For now, my advice is: upgrade to 1.3.3 and check that remove replytocom variables box, unless you really need the non-javascript version to work.
Anyone that’s browsing without JS enabled is probably used to bad UX across the web so this is a total no-brainer.
Great find Yoast. I just enabled that setting on the site :)
you amaze me every time, the way you stay on top of so many details.
Hi, I am with a problem anda maybe u can help here: since I changed my WP theme to Neuro ( http://cyberchimps.com/neuro/ ), all the page and post titles are wrong, repeating the name of the site in the beggining of every title. I tryed to turn on the Overwrite titles option but id doesn´t helped. Any tips? Thanks!
Hi, same thing happened to me while using the Warp Framework from YOOtheme. I am not sure it is the same problem, but I fixed it by modifying the head.php file. Try looking for something like
and delete de “name” part. That might fix it.
Nice catch! I went and enabled it on the site and I will send an alert out to all of our clients.
Thanks for this update! Will definitely upgrade.
Sounds like a great way to keeps comments nice and neat as well as a lot more manageable.
You always rocks! Already using that option, I just love your SEO plugin, thanks a lot.
This is so much informative, i will upgrade to new version though i am still a bit confussed with replytocom behaviour for non-javascript!
I’m still a bit confused about replytocom but i have check remove ?replytocom variable and update your plugin.
Thanks Joost! Once again, thoroughly explaining a feature in your plugin that I needed to activate. I am finding a lot of issues with other plugins that aren’t creating nofollows when they really should, although one generates links on my login page that are getting followed. Wondering if I should just no-index my login page…
I will try your SEO plugin, thanks a lot.
off topic: What happened to GD Star Rating 2.0 ?
I need to check if this is the case with my websites. Thanks for this update.
I just switched over from ALL in One SEO to your plugin and I am loving it. I am going to go back to some of my older posts and update the SEO data.
I just made the switch that you recommended in this post too.
Take Care. :)
Thanks for sharing such an important information. I did not know Word press does this. I have to check my website and will definitely upgrade. Thanks again.
I honestly did not understand and overwhelms me because I have no follow tags fucked for me link building strategy, if there are other related article which extend my information … I thank you.
Hi master, I am a beginner blogger, I think the tips that you give very useful, but if the tips above is 100% SEO??? Thank you …
i knew about the replytocom links leading to bad seo so i had already blocked those kind of urls in my robots file…additionally you can also use google webmaster tools to exclude replytocom links via the url parameters option!
Why not block all query string URLs with robots.txt (assuming you have pretty permalinks)?
Disallow: /*?$ # disallow any URL that ends in a ? (more specifically, it will block any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by a string, followed by a ?, with no characters after the ?).
Disallow: /*? # block any URL that includes a ? (more specifically, it will block any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string).
didn\’t understand the thing about ?replytocom in the plugin. so came back here and enabled it.
Hello Joost, thanks for the tips but…
i checked the \”Remove the ?replytocom variables\” and i\’m getting duplicate contents. (Duplicate meta descriptions and title tags-more than 100 urls in each…and counting) see a screenshot here
What could be causing that? i guess i would have to uncheck it asap, just waiting for your reply on this.
The second issue is that, google analytics is also causing duplicate contents. check it out in the screenshot. Any quick solution?
This mistake has always been on my site for a while. I have removed now and thanks to your detailed posts :) I would install Yoast plugin on other sites of mine to prevent them from getting the same error.
Still somewhat confused about this aspect of the plugin. Can someone shed some light. In creating a post I\’m offered the box \”What is the main keyword or key phrase this page should be found for?\” What should I put in there? Keywords separated by commas or the title of the post?
Thanks and any help would be extremely helpful
Dear I\’m using WordPress SEO by Yoast, And its simply amazing.. It helps me alot in Search engine optimisation. I really recommand this plugin. Thanks a lot for this feature :)
Still a bit confused with replytocom behavior with no javascript. But I will upgrade the plugin anyway. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing such an important information :D
Thank you Joost for pointing this out. I believe there are more effective ways to avoid these type of queries being indexed. You could simply create a robot.txt file.
Correct me if I am wrong about this.
I haven\’t experienced this yet with my site, but I really believe it has to do with what theme and design your wordpress website is in. Every theme is unique to its developer and will be coded differently, so this may or may not apply to everybody.
Great post and nice follow up comments here nonetheless.
Thanks for the tip, Joost.
Anyone else noticing that nested comment replies do not work anymore? I can\’t really say if it is caused by this plugin or not but I only installed it for a couple of days and a couple of my readers were pinging me about it.
I tested it by myself with JS active and could not reply to a specific user either.
Hi, I have still some questions about this.
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-replytocom?replies=3#post-3690976
I agree, I don’t want to lose nested comments functionality just to get rid of this error. Isn’t there a better way?
Great job Yoast. I just enabled that setting on the site. now i’m ready for jump high ;)
I found these “Reply to comment” on my web hosting account as NEW urls. I simply deleted them thinking they were some part of spam. In your opinion should I let them be and add them as new urls to my site map or continue to delete them? Thanks for helping us out by pointing these things out by the way.
I am not familiar with reply to com. I only reply to whatever discussion that I am interested in personal blogs. Maybe I should try this plug-in to see if it will be convenient for me to use. I am aware of noindex and nofollow but I haven’t tried applying it. Thanks for the interesting suggestions, which I could try later on.
Nice post, I have upgraded. The problem I am having now however is, every 4 days or so my slider links turn to 404 errors. I go into WP and click permalink postname which is already set on and it fixes the issue but just temporarily. Strange issue. Any info would be appreciated.
Totally agree with Ben Milleare, above – it’s a small minority of web users who don’t have Javascript / have it disabled. The ones that do have probably done so by choice, so they’re going to be expecting UI issues.
For example, I use the NoScript plugin for Firefox for security, and I totally expect it to break websites until I allow them to run script. So it seems like there’s almost no cost to disabling these replytocom links.
Great find @Joost…. I just enabled that setting :) Thanks for sharing..