The Replytocom Dilemma

Last month, I noticed that popular posts in my tech blog have triple entries in my google analytics account because of the parameters replytocom and fb_xd_fragment. As I see it, these url paramters are causing duplicated content in my wordpress site and thus wreak havoc in my SEO.

I was able to come up with the fb_xd_fragment fix but I never found the perfect solution to replytocom issues until this morning.

What causes Replytocom?

I first thought that replytocom has something to do with google's crawling and indexing or this has something do with spam bots. I noticed though that the issue has come up by the time I switched wordpress theme (my site in question uses a tweaked twenty ten wordpress theme) and so I suspected this has something to do with my tweaking the theme. I realized I was sort of right for blaming my theme for the dilemma when I learned today where the /?replytocom= comes from:

The ?replytocom urls are created in wordpress sites that enable threaded (nested) comments. If you hover over the reply to comment, the ?replytocom urls will show in the browser status bar.

?Replytocom Solution

If the nested comments are causing all these replytocom issues, the obvious solution would be to remove those reply to comments link.

Go to wordpress settings>Discussion > Other comment settings and untick "Enable threaded (nested) comments". This would remove the links causing the replytocom issues.

Easy as a pie, isn't it?

For those who prefer to retain threaded comments in their sites, some sites recommended solutions to Replytocom wordpress issues:

Installing and Using Replytocom plugin

Telling google to ignore replytocom parameter via google webmasters tool site configuration setting.

Adding Disallow: *?replytocom to robots.txt file