How to fix comment-page-1 URLs in WordPress

Step by step

1. Confirm paging is the source

Open a post with many comments and look for Older Comments or Newer Comments links under the thread. Hover one: the address ends in /comment-page-1/#comments or similar. With plain permalinks the same thing appears as ?cpage=1. In Search Console, the Pages report may list these under Alternate page with proper canonical tag or Duplicate without user-selected canonical, depending on what canonical the page prints.

2. Decide whether you need comment paging

Paging exists to keep heavy threads from slowing a page. Count your reality: if your busiest post has under a couple of hundred comments, one page handles it. If a handful of posts have thousands, paging helps those posts, and you will fix the canonicals instead of removing the pages.

3. Turn paging off

1. Go to Settings → Discussion.
2. Find Break comments into pages. Current versions show it in the Comment Pagination row, older ones under Other comment settings. Untick it.
3. Click Save Changes.

From then on the whole thread prints on the post URL. WordPress's canonical redirect strips the comment-page-N segment from any request, so old addresses forward to the post and existing links keep working.

4. Check the redirect

Request an old comment page and read the headers:

curl -sI https://example.com/a-post/comment-page-2/ | grep -iE "^HTTP|^location"

Expect a 301 and a location header with the post's own URL. If you get a 200, a page cache is still serving the old copy: purge it and try again.

5. If you keep paging, fix the canonical

Core WordPress gives each comment page a canonical that points to itself, so Google is told the copies are separate pages. With Hydrogen SEO active, the canonical on every comment page is the post's permalink, which tells search engines to fold the copies into the post. To confirm, view the source of /a-post/comment-page-2/ and find rel="canonical". The href should be the post URL with no comment-page part.

6. Tune the paging settings

With paging on, two more fields under the same checkbox matter:

• Top level comments per page. The default is 50. A higher number means fewer copies of the article.
• Comments page to display by default, first page or last page. With last page, the post URL shows the newest comments and page 1 lives at /comment-page-1/. With first page, WordPress redirects /comment-page-1/ to the post, because they would be identical.

Pick one arrangement and leave it. Switching the default page later changes which comments sit on which URL.

7. Let Search Console catch up

Old comment-page URLs move to Page with redirect once paging is off, or stay under Alternate page with proper canonical tag if you kept paging with a correct canonical. Both are normal, non-error states. No action is needed on those lists.

Do not noindex or block comment pages

Two shortcuts make things worse. A Disallow: /*/comment-page- rule in robots.txt stops Google fetching the pages, so it can never see the redirect or the canonical, and links pointing at those addresses lead nowhere. A noindex on comment pages discards them without passing anything to the post. A redirect or a canonical consolidates the copies into the post. Blocking and noindex only hide them.

Related comment URLs worth cleaning up

Comment paging is one of three ways comments multiply addresses. Each Reply link is its own URL with ?replytocom= in it, and every post has a comments feed at /a-post/feed/. Hydrogen SEO's Crawl cleanup section under Hydrogen SEO → General has a switch for each: Remove ?replytocom= from reply links and Turn off post comments feeds. Both are off by default; see crawl cleanup before switching them on.