![\"replytocom](\"http:\/\/www.janleow.com\/imgs\/2013\/replytocom_error.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhile browsing around the Google webmaster central, happened to bump into HTML improvement section and saw the replytocom duplicate title tags content warning. I was pretty sure what I wrote would not be duplicate within my website domain or my other sites. After all, Google frowns upon such duplicate content.<\/p>\n
Upon further digging, it seems this is a WordPress issue. It automatically generates a suffix with a ?replytocom=xxx whenever comments are generated. I wonder why WordPress does such a thing, didn’t they know duplicate content is harmful to a site ranking against Google especially with the Panda algorithm?<\/p>\n
Anyway, I found the solution and thought I reshare and at the same time make a personal note for myself in my blog.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
To check whether you are also facing such replytocom issues in your WordPress installation, head on to Google Webmaster Central, and check under:<\/p>\n
–> Search Appearance
\n —>HTML Improvements
\n —-> Duplicate Title Tags<\/p>\n
It will show you how many pages Google has detected in your WordPress website indexed with duplicate title tags. For my case only about 6 were detected. Although I’m pretty sure there are more of such pages, somehow the Google bots only managed to crawl those pages.<\/p>\n
To prevent such crawling of WordPress auto generated replytocom pages, head over to:<\/p>\n
![\"replytocom](\"http:\/\/www.janleow.com\/imgs\/2013\/replytocom_url_parameter.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
–> Crawl
\n —-> URL Parameters
\n —–> Add Parameter<\/p>\n
![\"replytocom](\"http:\/\/www.janleow.com\/imgs\/2013\/replytocom_removal.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Key in the parameters as per above picture.<\/p>\n
You may check the parameter by looking through the “Show example URLs”. I saw I have many such pages though I wonder why it wasn’t crawled earlier.<\/p>\n
Anyway, save the new parameter and wait for the Google Webmaster to refresh its data.<\/p>\n
In addition, you may want to add this code into your ROBOT.TXT file located in the root directory of your website.<\/p>\n
Disallow: *?replytocom<\/b><\/p>\n
This should further prevent not only Google bots, but exclude other spiders as well from crawling your replytocom duplicate content.<\/p>\n
Apart from the above two methods, a third option is to use a WordPress plugin. However I decided against installing this plugin as that would mean more processes running in the WordPress software. If the above settings should work, there was no need to install additional plugin.<\/p>\n
Since I’ve just set up the above parameters, I just have to wait and see the end result from Google Webmaster Central after it refreshes its data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While browsing around the Google webmaster central, happened to bump into HTML improvement section and saw the replytocom duplicate title tags content warning. I was pretty sure what I wrote would not be duplicate within my website domain or my other sites. After all, Google frowns upon such duplicate content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[12],"tags":[31,131,160,162,165],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1bS5F-Yw","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3198,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/fixing-the-penalty-of-google-panda-2-5-2-update.html","url_meta":{"origin":3752,"position":0},"title":"Fixing the Penalty of Google Panda 2.5.2 update","author":"Jan","date":"14 December 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"It's been awhile since my last post. Ever since the penalty imposed by the October 14, 2011 Google Panda 2.5.2 update, my website traffic has gone down, and so did my motivation for running my personal blogs and websites. The hit was rather severe causing both my authoritative guide website\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Website"","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3103,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/domain-name-with-without-www-prefix.html","url_meta":{"origin":3752,"position":1},"title":"To use or not to use WWW before your domain name","author":"Jan","date":"18 August 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"It seems the www. prefix to your domain name is actually a subdomain. When internet first started, and website were being created, www prefix would refer to a website as being a World Wide Web, probably trying to differentiate from the intranet website I suppose. However, due to frequent usage,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Website"","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1678,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/google-webmaster-central-dns-verification-method.html","url_meta":{"origin":3752,"position":2},"title":"Google Webmaster Central DNS Verification Method","author":"Jan","date":"21 July 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Google Webmaster Central DNS verification method is a little tricky to use in comparison with the HTML and META tag version. However there are instances where you would need to use DNS verification in situation where your domain is not using a normal web hosting provider and such you have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Website"","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":728,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/make-drupal-website-cms-content-management-software.html","url_meta":{"origin":3752,"position":3},"title":"Making a Drupal Web Site","author":"Jan","date":"22 July 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Drupal is like a jack of all trades. You could use it for setting a proper website with tier like structure for easy navigation, you could use it to set up a forum, or you just use it to set up a blogging site. It is so versatile that according\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Website"","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3564,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/tinkering-with-my-websites-hopefully-it-would-provide-better-website-traffic.html","url_meta":{"origin":3752,"position":4},"title":"Tinkering with my websites, hopefully it would provide better website traffic!","author":"Jan","date":"26 July 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"There are many interesting open source software out there. Almost whatever you can think off, some clever person or persons with lots of spare time and altruistic nature would come up with it! So far as far as self hosting blogging went, Wordpress was still the best by far. That\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Website"","block_context":{"text":"Website","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/website"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":23,"url":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/build-home-business-website.html","url_meta":{"origin":3752,"position":5},"title":"Building up my homebiz website","author":"Jan","date":"22 April 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Finally fixed my soho-home-business.com website. After a long while evaluating which CMS to use, I've decided to go with Joomla. It has its advantages and disadvantages. And one of them is the URL which is not so SEO friendly. But I have encountered several websites where the URL isn't SEO\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Biz"","block_context":{"text":"Biz","link":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/category\/biz"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3752"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3755,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3752\/revisions\/3755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janleow.com\/life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}