Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Wordpress Comments Pagination
-
Hi Mozzers
What is your view on the following. Should you
- Paginate comments to increase page speed? If yes, at what # of comments would you begin pagination? (with the objective being decreasing page load times)
- Apply rel="canonical" back to the main article URL? eg: url/comment-page-1 => url
- noindex the comment pages?
- create a "View all" comments page?
Thanks in advance for your help!
J -
If you are hitting the 200-300 comments/page mark it might be better to get into pagination from a sheer UX perspective - depending on their dedication to the content matter, it is unlikely that the average user is going to want to sift through so many comments after reading your content.
I don't know what audience you are targeting, but it seems to me that 25-50 would be sufficient to capture the essence of most commenting sections regardless of topic and would also help with loading times.
Ray makes a great point about the canonical tag and rel tags though - as with everything, your strategy has to account for your specific situation and marketing approach.
-
Thanks for the response Ray-pp! Would you say the same if the page had over 1,000 comments? The average is around ~200-300 comments per page
-
I say to put all those comments on a single page. If I'm searching through comments, I hate skipping through multiple pages.
If comments are increasing your page load speed, then pagination may be the solution, but I would try to solve the performance bottleneck first. You would want a proper canonical tag and use prev/next rel tags.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is pagination SEO such a mystery in 2021?
Hi folks. I would like to discuss pagination. I use WordPress (Genesis, specifically). I ran my site through a site scan and it flagged an error which told me that my blog was producing duplicate meta descriptions because the  blog is paginated - the same meta description from the blog page is being used on Page 2, Page 3 etc. I looked into this and the Internet is awash with many other people scratching around for a solution. My understanding is that using a canonical link on the first page is not a good idea, because it says to Google that only Page 1 of the blog is important. I also read an article that states Google no longer reads the Rel=Prev/Next code that could be used to tell Google to ignore the issue. So, what's the solution? Do I even need one? As a side-thought, it seems to me that pagination is, well, pretty useless. I mean, if my blog has 20 pages and I've worked hard to create content, who is going to click through to anywhere near page 20? Nobody. There has to be a smarter way for people on-site to access content. I would love your thoughts on all of this. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs   (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 **   ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs   **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2    **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
How to enable lost trailing slash redirection in WordPress with Yoast plugin
Hi, We have lost the non-slash to slash URL redirection in our WP site. We are using Yoast SEO. All the settings are normal and we have enabled the related code in .htaccess too. Still we couldn't able to find why we lost. Please help. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How to remove skip links, main navigation, sidebars as h2 tags in wordpress genesis
Our website CMS is wordpress. Due to the Genesis Framework; below 4 phrases tuned into h2 tags: Skip links, Header Right, Main navigation and Footer. How to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Hreflang and paginated page
Hi, I can not seem to find good documentation about the use of hreflang and paginated page when using rel=next , rel=prev
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ
Does any know where to find decent documentatio?, I could only find documentation about pagination and hreflang when using canonicals on the paginated page. I have doubts on what is the best option: The way tripadvisor does it:
http://www.tripadvisor.nl/Hotels-g187139-oa390-Corsica-Hotels.html
Each paginated page is referring to it's hreflang paginated page, for example: So should the hreflang refer to the pagined specific page or should it refer to the "1st" page? in this case:
http://www.tripadvisor.nl/Hotels-g187139-Corsica-Hotels.html Looking foward to your suggestions.0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0