Hi,

We've been using Atahualpa for quite some time and I just discovered using Google Webmaster Tools that when a post has a lot of comments, administrative words like the month the comments were posted and the word "reply" are being interpreted as keywords on the page by the Googlebot because they appear with every comment. Half of the keywords they relate to our site are irrelevant words like "Reply", "July", "August" and so on...

What would be the best way to try to change the page so that these things will not be indexed or, if necessary simply not be on the page at all?

I thought about possibly changing the "reply" text into an image and removing dates from the comments altogether in the comments.php

I really have no idea what would be the best way to handle this. Might this work or is there a better way to correct this?

Thanks in advance!

Michael

One other detail - the BFA Comments feed is also throwing off the keywords. Is the best way to handle it to simply click the option to not display it on posts?

I didn't know if there was a way to somehow get search engines to ignore it other than removing it from posts. Basically, when a recent post about chocolate cookies is getting comments and being displayed in the BFA Comments feed, the keywords "chocolate cookies" will appear as the most relevant keywords on a post about paying off credit cards, which is clearly not relevant.

Any suggestions you can recommend would be most appreciated!

Thanks!

Michael

what you probably want is a 'rel="nofollow"' added to the links the problem is that Atahualpa is calling the wordpress function 'wp_list_comments' to handle all the comments so you would have to find it in the wordpress code and change it there. Maybe there is a plugin that would change it

or you could use a seo plugin and set the post/page to 'noindex'

Thanks for the input, but the problem is not following links-- I think your noindex would be great if there was a way to restrict it to only certain parts of the page. Basically, we want the pages indexed but not the date and the word "reply" above each comment. I hate to say it, but I think the only way to prevent the date from being indexed is to remove it.

is it possible for me to replace the word "reply" in the comments template with an image of the word reply? I though I'd test putting an image tag in place of the text. I know that would prevent "reply" from being mistaken as page content.

Michael

The date and word 'reply' are links! Reply is a link to the comment form on the page and the date is also a on page link. Both are created by the Wordpress function and are not controlled by the theme.

Oh yeahhh! ;-) I forgot they were linked! Thanks for pointing out that they weren't part of the theme! I didn't even think about that.

Thanks again!

Michael