Last night I finally got around to updating my Revolutiontheme template used on one of my wordpress sites to version 4.0. I like to keep things up-to-date. In July of 2008 I wrote about another wordpress theme duplicate content issues with this same template since it pulled in various content from different categories.
This new issues deals with the new features that came out with version 2.7 that has to deal with the comment pagination. The next day I updated one of the static pages on that site and ran the xml sitemap software to update it. Suddenly I had hundreds of new pages all of them with comment-page-1 and /?replytocom=XXX#respond.
While the comment-page-1 link would open into what appears as a new folder /comment-page-1/#comment-XXX while this would not necessarily be bad if it actually opened up a new page with just the comments on it. But since it opens up with the exact same content it does become an issue.
The /?replytocom=XXX#respond does not appear to be quite an issue, yet I still believe the search engines will see this as duplicate content until they adjust their algorithms to accommodate it or until wordpress provides a better solution to address this duplicate content issue.
For now the solution is go into settings – Discussion and find
and then change it to this:
I wish there was a better solution to this issue. I know some will say not to worry about duplicate content issues. The search engines will sort it out and deliver the one it believes to be correct.
While that may seem like a logical solution, I believe we have to think ahead. Duplicate content wastes resouces, with what is possible here you could end up with hundreds upon hundreds of duplicate content. All of which would be indexed whether it is duplicate content or not.
Now for the reason in my opinion why we had better wake up and pay attention to it, if we want to be found on any search engine in the future. The Times Online ran an article environmental impact of google, essentially they are say that doing a google search two searches on google generate the same enviromental impact as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to research.
Now Google did reply to this in a roundabout way via their blog, about the steps they’ve already taken to reduce their carbon footprint. With all the rhetoric about global warming, whether you believe it or not, pressure will be brought against the search engines by environmental groups.
So there is now doubt, that they will begin to seriously take a look at how much of their carbon foot print they can reduce by dropping completely from searches any website that has hundreds, upon hundreds of duplicate pages?
After all if two searches, leaves a carbon foot print equal to boiling a kettle of water, what does crawling hundreds to thousands of duplicate pages on Ten’s of millions of website?
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