What is Replytocom URL’s
Replytocom URL’s are the auto generated URL’s form wordpress blog site with enabled reply to comments feature. Basically Replytocom URL’s are kind of a query string added to your original URL. Or you can say Replytocom are the parameter which get appended in your post permalink for the comments you have on your Blog, so for example if your original URL look like http://www.tips4developer.com/joomla/3-security-extensions-secure-joomla-website/
then replytocom URL will become something like http://www.tips4developer.com/joomla/3-security-extensions-secure-joomla-website ?replytocom=1192. So it automatically add ?replytocom=# at the end of your original URL
How does Replytocom URL’s get generated
Basically these URL’s get generated from the posts comments you gets form the site visitors, so as much as comments you have on your posts as much replytocom URL’s get generated. But that does not mean that you have to disable commenting feature from your Blog. Instead we have good solution to get rid of it.
Issue and Drawbacks of Replytocom URL’s
Replytocom links are actually a serious problem which –
1. Eventually bring steep fall in rankings among the search engines
2. Search Engines will detect your pages as duplicate content
3. Will consume high database usage, because bots will asks a repetitive requests to your server to crawl already crawled URL with non replytocom URL
How to remove replytocom URL’s
- Handeling replycom URL’s with Google Webmaster Tool
- Open your Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
- Expand the ‘Site Configuration’ menu on the left hand side of the Dashboard.
- Click on the Settings option & go to the ‘URL parameters’.
- Then click on “Configure URL parameters” displayed on right side main page
- Click on “Edit” link of “replytocom” row
- Update the settings as per below screen cap
- Handeling replycom URL’s with Robots.txt file
Simply add the below line on your Roborts.txt fileDisallow: *?replytocom - Handeling replycom URL’s with WordPress Plugin
In case you are not much comfortable with Robots.txt file, the other best option you have is to let the WordPress plugin to handle the issue. So you simple need to download and install Replytocom redirector plugin, that automatically deal with the bot.
I hope the above information is going to helps you allot.
I fully agree with this solution and as much as possible bloggers should not depend so much on plugins.
Great job Amit!