Do a quick search on google with site:yourwordpressblog.com “?Replytocom” . If you find any pages in search result, then you have duplicate content issue on your wordpress blog. These pages are anchored with Reply option below a wordpress blog post with threaded comments. Well, google bots and other search engine bots should really know how to handle pages with replytocom parameter. Also wordpress should come up with some kind of fix. But, it seems that is not the option right now. Several of such pages are created with the same content on them depending on the number of comments you have on a particular post. And, google webmaster tools also must be reporting duplicate content issue. This can be huge problem and hurt your search engine rankings badly. Imagine hundreds of post pages with same content on them. Well, I have found two ways to solve this problem.
Install Replytocom Redirector Plugin
Replytocom redirector plugin guides search engine bots who don’t know how to handle urls with replytocom parameter in a wordpress blog. The download link for this plugin is here.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/replytocom-redirector/
Use Parameter Handling Option In Google Webmaster Tools
Add your site to google webmaster tools, if you still haven’t. After verifying your site on Google Webmaster tools, go to site configuration–> Settings–> Parameter handling. Here you’ll find some parameters listed which google bot has found on your site while crawling. Click on edit for parameter ‘replytocom’ and change it from ‘Let Google decide’ to ‘Ignore’ and you are all good now.
Hey Thanks for the help, I was having the same issue from a long time and was worried. I hope everything will be fine now,
Glad, I could help!:)
Thank you for the post. Currenltly, I have the Replytcom Redirector installed on my WP blog and it indicates it has not been tested on the latest version of WP. And it is not working for me. Do you know of any other fix? I have the google webmaster tools set to Ignore for robot.txt also already. Thanks so much.
Have you added this
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?*
in robots.txt file? Its working fine for me. Takes some time. You’ll see changes in few weeks when replytocom URLs will start disappearing from google index.
It really takes a while! I’ve made this change a couple of weeks ago and Google Webmaster still reports the replytocom as duplicates. The number has gone down by half though, but I wonder whether this caused the Google Panda effect on my blog
Thanks for this post.
I set up the “replytocom” parameter to ignore right now in webmaster tools.
I don’t want to install others plugin. I hope to solve : )
Alessandro
I’ve come up with another solution using the Real-Time Find and Replace plugin that changes the replytocom parameter to use a # instead of a ?. A little hard to explain in a comment box, but I’ve got a post on it here (see rule 1):
http://infolific.com/technology/blogging-and-web-publishing/handiest-wordpress-plugin-youve-never-heard-of/