"Replytocom" Tag Causing Indexing Issues
It was as if I needed more challenges in indexing. The previous challenge was "Blocked due to other 4xx issue."
Support was not able to help there, since their solution was another sitemap. Kyle, on the other hand directed me to an option that it might be a plugin conflict. I don't have many Plug-ins. I only have the ones required by WA and one for social sharing that I installed based on a recommendation from one very active support person in the community who jumps at every question.
I decided to delete that social plug-in, and decided that I don't even have decent traffic, why should I trouble myself and the site with social sharing? Furthermore, if anyone is really interested in sharing a piece that I have written, then they can spend the effort to copy the URL.
Once I did that, the problem was solved. A few days later I found the error "Replytocom=," and one site was affected. I checked with chatGPT which indicated that this problem arises from the comments area and that this tag needs to be added to the "noindex" tags.
There were different options provided by ChatGPT, but they either depended on a SEO plug-in that allows such a thing, or access to the code. Our SEO Framework does not allow such alterations, and of course, we don't have access to the code.
Therefore, I contacted support right away. Their first reaction was that this is a GSC issue and that they only support hosting issues. I had to repeat the issue again in detail to finally tell me that they will look into the matter and get back to me.
Because of the time difference, today I found a request from support to provide them with a screenshot of the issue. When I opened the GSC, I found the problem expanding from one post being affected, now four posts are affected.
The strange thing this is affecting posts that I recently added and it is not affecting old posts. I don't know if any updates or changes are causing this to happen.
I hope support will find a solution for this, because I am really looking forward to getting rid of all indexing challenges that I have been facing throughout my experience with WA.
Anybody else is facing this "Replytocom=" tag issue?
Recent Comments
7
New update from Support: They gave me a new sitemap to use and guided me to the Removals tool in GSC.
Of course, the Removals tool is only a temporary one for six months. The permanent solution is in the hands of support which is either add the "Replytocom=" tag to the noindex rules or modify the Robots.txt file.
I am not sure why they don't want to apply a permanent solution. If it was something I have access to, I would have done, and I made a lot of research and wasted a lot of time on the issue, to play ball with support and help them through, but unfortunately, the permanent solutions are in their hands only.
I will continue updating here hoping that support will finally recognize that the comments area needs attention. The "Replytocom=" tag is not the only problem. There was a previous issue, but that one everybody agreed that it does not have a serious effect on anything. Still, when we start having a couple of issues with something, this means that it needs attention.
Here is the reply of support
"We have following discussions regarding the same issue with canonical tags on the following URl's
How to remove "alternate page with proper canonical tag" in gsc?
What does alternate page with proper canonical tag mean and how to fix it ?
We see the proper information is on the URL:
https://rankmath.com/kb/alternate-page-with-proper-canonical-tag/
I hope this will help you in correcting the issue."
I have consumed all the discussions that support sent me. All this means that their is a tag being generated that causes a whole new Url being produced with the same content as the original post.
This particular Tag "Replytocom=" is being produced by the comments section.
I understand that the original content with the original URL are not affected, but support wants to stop the whole thing at me fixing something that I cannot fix.
The problem is generated within the code of the comments sections. Another solution is make Google ignore the tag by labeling it as "noindex", again we cannot do that because SEO framework does not allow us to do that.
This is frustrating..
This may help.
Jay's comment What does alternate page with proper canonical tag mean and how to fix it ? Abie
unfortunately this discussion does not specifically help in deleting the "Replytocom=" .
there are only two solutions:
one is temporary solution for six months using the Removals tool in GSC
The other is playing with Robots.txt file which we don't have access to since a code needs to be added.
Support gave me a solution that does not work since they guided me into using the Crawl settings in GSC which is not available. Or at least I couldn't find it.
Hi Archer!
Sorry to hear you are having these issues.
I have not ever had the Replytocom=" tag issue. I have had others but not that one. Keep us posted! It may pop up for others.
See more comments
The Final Update..
The last answer from support guided me into contacting the SEO plugin to get information on how to modify the noindex to include the Replytocom= tag
I am not going to waste more time on this.. for the time being I am going to ignore the replytocom= tag, as the original content is not being affected and only the content with the tag are the affected ones which logically ends up as a noindex rule, but implemented by google.
Still, for me, this is still a problem with the comments area added to the previously discussed non critical issue of ""Comment" object must be nested inside a "CreativeWork" object" and missing field Url.
All this shows that attention needs to be given to the comments area of the blog but Support does not want to move there. That is fine, at the end, I am a customer and this will be added to my WA experience on the negative side.
I hope that the day when the negatives outweigh the positives will not get closer.