Seems this might be a new function? I’m on 2.1.3 but will probably update to 2.2 now.

Yep, just the comment feeds. You’d want to be mad to try to remove the comments (even if you could, which you cant without removing the post).

All I know is that you take a look in the supplemental index and you’ll regularly find the comment feeds in there. Makes sense as they have very little linkage to them and are highly duplicitous of the page they come from.

Rgds
Richard

The feed maybe, but the comments themselves are golddust

Michele

I read that John Chow story you linked to – the only thing there was that he had gone a little strong with his robots.txt and dissalowed most of his site. I think there’s definitely value in removing the comments feed from the index though.

Rgds
Richard

Ah.
That makes more sense

Michele

I don’t like the idea of disallowing trackbacks and adding nofollow. It does away with the entire “interconnected web” concept in my mind, which is why I am so happy with the way MT handles it.

Michele – who is trying to migrate away from WordPress

comments_rss_link( 'feed' )

to

<a rel='nofollow' href='<?php echo get_post_comments_feed_link() ?>'>feed</a>

The text ‘feed’ can be whatever you desire of course.

Hint – if there’s a WP template tag that prints something, then chances are there’s a get_* function that gets that value first

What does get_post_comments_feed_link() do? And does this function need to be updated to include a rel=”nofollow” attribute?

TBH you could actually give these links a rel=”noindex” so that the bots would still crawl your RSS feeds, just never actually index them. It’s a bit of a toss-up though.

Cheers for contributing.
Rgds
Richard

Next time you upgrade WordPress you won’t have to worry about losing your valuable custom changes!

I actually dug into the WordPress Codex and have a fix for the .htaccess problem – extremely simple.

I have a post queued that explains it.

Rgds
Richard

If you change the permissions on the .htaccess so that Apache can’t write to it your problems will go away

Michele

PS: Nice article

@Frank – would you believe that I only re-uploaded my .htaccess file yesterday and the bloody thing has been overwritten today. I’m gonna find what it is that is rewriting the file if it’s the last thing I do [today :)]. Hope there is something of value to you above.

Rgds to both
Richard

I think this would probably resolve any issues, but I don’t think I have tried it on a site experiencin the issue yet – I really wanted to figure out what was causing WP to rewrite the file when it really shouldn’t be, but after a certain amount of investigation I got confounded by it!

On BifSniff the htaccess file is simply not writable so it never had that issue, I update the htaccess file by hand. But as you know I have had the issue of WP rewriting the htaccess file on other sites!

It might be an interesting experiment to exclude the comment feeds from being indexed and see what impact it might have.

Thanks again for taking this time to go through the site, much appreciated. It’s always good to have fresh eyes on something!

Particularly appreciated as I realise how busy you’ve been of late!

Regards,
Martina