Plugin Needed to Prevent Numbered Canonical URLs for Each Reply Within a Topic

[SethWilliams]

What would you like done?
I’m looking for a developer who can build a plugin that will remove the numbered URLs that show up for each reply when scrolling down a topic (/2, /3, /4, etc), so that search engines will be unable to crawl and index these additional URLs that are created for each topic (Google is supposed to ignore these canonical URLs, but in many cases, they don’t).

For an overview of the problem and why I’m trying to do this, see my original post here.

It’s not a problem to have the page=2, page=3, etc that are added to the topic URL for each page. I’m just looking for a way to prevent my forum from adding the /2, /3, /4 canonical links at the end of each reply.

When do you need it done?
There isn’t a tight timeline on this. My primary concern is to know if this can be done at all.

Assuming it can be done, I would be looking to have this done sometime in the first quarter of 2022.

What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
$2,000

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

It’s possible, but I wouldn’t advise it in a plugin. Assumptions about the path structure are found across various places in the codebase, and other customisations (plugins and themes) for that matter. You could build something that would address all of those instances now, however that would likely change.

I would advise continuing to advocate for addressing this (to the extent it’s an issue) in the core app as you have been. You’ll get a better result for this issue, one way or another, at the end of that process.

Building a plugin won’t necessarily get you the “right” result faster (getting this right in the initial version would take a while) and you’ll end up with a worse result in the end for this kind of issue (i.e. a structural SEO issue).