WordPress Canonical URL Problem: comment-page-1

WordPress has a setting that can cause SEO problems on websites.

You might notice that a WordPress post on your site has a normal URL like this:

• https://example.com/hello-world/

But Google Search Console, or a quick look at the HTML source code, will show a canonical URL like this:

• https://example.com/hello-world/comment-page-1/#comments

That is incorrect, and it’s detrimental for SEO.

How to Fix the Canonical URL

Go to your WordPress settings page for discussions. The path will normally be: /wp-admin/options-discussion.php.

Look for the setting that says something like this, and uncheck the box:

Break comments into 50 pages with top level comments per page and the last page displayed by default

Here’s a screenshot:

Unchecking that box will remove comment-page-1 from the post URLs and fix the incorrect canonical URLs.