Replytocom link issues arise usually when you have lots of comments to your individual posts. But the worse happens when Google indexes all those replies to comment links.
This results in 100’s of duplicate content of the same post and keeps on increasing the number of comment increases. Overall, if this problem is not controlled then you might see thousands of duplicate content and hundreds of warning in your webmaster tool’s HTML improvement section.
Finally, this will result in the Google panda penalty on your website and you will sink your website’s traffic.
The same happens when you allow the image attachments to open on their own page. I mean when you don’t add any 301 permanent or canonical tags to your image attachment pages. So when you readers click on any image on any of your post, they get directed to a new webpage containing your image and this rarely contains any text description. So obviously, this page is of low quality and have the same title, thus one new duplicate content issue.
But the best thing is, all these can be controlled with one simple plugin named SEO by yoast.
Use SEO By Yoast To Fix Replytocom Link Issue
Below I am listing out all required steps you must follow inorder to fix this problem. Make sure to download and install the plugin, http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/.
Please follow the steps listed below.
- Move to your WordPress dashboard. Example : http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/
- Now move to the Plugins section.
- Use the word WordPress SEO and search for this plugin.
- Once you find Yoast, just install it on your website.
- Configure the plugin as per your need.
Make sure to click ” Force rewrite titles “. This option is available under : WordPress dashboard >> SEO >> Tittles & Metas. Then save the settings.
Now move to the plugins Permalink settings page. This option is available under : WordPress dashboard >> SEO >> Permalinks.
- Over here you have to select two options. 1st is ” Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post-URL. ” and 2nd is ” Remove the ?replytocom variables “
- Now click on save settings.
That’s all. If you are using any cache plugin and CDN then make to flush your cache so as to enforce these settings immediately.
Using Robot.Txt
One another simple way to fix this problem is using the robot.txt file. We all know that Google bots don’t give any importance to nofollow tags. So here we are going to use the nofollow link refer structure to prevent Google from giving any important to the replytocom links or to there pages.
This method is easy to perform and implement and you can see the results in less time. But the result is not guaranteed as search bots may even index these link.
Now please follow these steps.
- Move to your website hosting account and access cpanel.
- Or you can use FTP to connect yours to hosting account files.
- Now try to find your robot.txt file which is usually present in the root of the website.
- Now either download it or use online file editor to edit it online.
Add the required code to the bottom of robot.txt.
Disallow: *?replytocom
Now upload or save the file. If you are using any cache plugin then make sure to flush all your cache files. Now simply wait for three to four days and see the results.
When Will You See The Noticeable Changes
It depends completely on the search engines and the crawl rate which you or Google determine ( you can tweak the crawl rate through your webmaster tools account ).
One of the best ways to notify Google about the changes is using the Fetch as Google bot feature available in your webmaster’s account.
Webmaster Tools >> Crawl >> Fetch as Google.
Using this features will instantly send a search bot to crawl your website content and all the links. If you have made any noticeable changes like an update in content, changes in your link refer tags and others then it will be noticed by these bots.
Then you can wait for at least 24 hours for Google to make any considerable change and at least 48 hours to see the change in the search results.
If you have been penalized by Panda algorithmic update due to the duplicate content issue, then you may have to wait until next update or for at least one week to see changes in your organic traffic. I wish these two methods will help you easily fix replytocom link issue in your WordPress website.
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