Hello,
Thank you for reaching out to support.
It is simply a filter that is used to set it as true or false. Most SEO plugins do this because of the removal of ?replytocom variables prevent your site from creating lots of URLs with no added value. If you get a lot of comments then search engines have to follow all those URLs, which is a waste of your crawl budget. Therefore we remove these variables by default. This is the filter here: https://rankmath.com/kb/filters-hooks-api-developer/#remove-replytocom-query
Hope that helps.
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This reply was modified 4 years ago by
Uzair. Reason: Fixed a mistype (index to follow)
Thanks for clarifying, Uzair! But removing that variable makes replying to a particular comment impossible (so that it appears nested). So, in your view, it’s still reasonable to remove “?replytocom” for SEO purposes even though it breaks the replying functionality? I’m confused.
Hello,
We believe maintaining SEO is more important than inline replying. But, it might be more important for some blogs where you get 10s of comments a day and are using your website as a community. For other websites where inline commenting is not that important – it is recommended to block that.
This is obviously our opinion and in the world of SEO – there are always people with differing opinions which doesn’t mean one is right another is wrong. It is just that we have chosen this approach based on our research and consultation with 100s of content bloggers who all agree SEO is more important than a UI option than less than 1% of your visitors might use.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Thanks for your thorough reply, Uzair! That makes sense. I just figured that since WordPress is so popular these days and this ‘?replytocom’ parameter is built into it by default, Google would be smart enough to detect these ‘?replytocom’ URLs and handle them appropriately…
Are you sure Google indexes those URLs? Why not just exclude those URLs from indexing either at the site’s side (through your plugin for example) or at the Google’s side?
Hello,
We already use canonical URL so those will not be indexed anyway. It is just that Google will follow your comment links and you do not want to waste your crawl budget on these things that you can avoid.
With that said, you are free to add the filter we gave you if you want to take the second approach of using the links like a default WP installation.
WordPress is so popular that you think Google will automatically not crawl wp-admin folder and yet you need to add that to your robots.txt. So, we have to work with what we have and make sure there are no issues from our end.
Hope that helps.
4 years ago
Hi,
Recently, I noticed that whenever I replied to a comment directly in the article (rather than from WordPress Comments section), my reply would appear at the end of all comments, not addressed to the person I was replying to (not nested under his comment).
I did some research and found that this issue has been reported multiple times by other RankMath users, and your solution to add this filter to functions.php:
add_filter( ‘rank_math/frontend/remove_reply_to_com’, ‘__return_false’);
seems to work for me as well.
What I’m wondering is why you remove ‘Replytocom’ in the first place? What purpose does it serve other than breaking the Reply function in WordPress??