Removing the /2, /3, /4, etc links for each reply within a topic URL

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

This has come up a little bit before: Google indexing same page multiple times: Issue with canonicals

@SethWilliams

When Google indexes a lot of extra pages and these pages don’t get much activity, it tells Google that the domain as a whole has a lot of low-quality URLs and it hurts the domain health as a whole (as it did in our case). We lost about 40% of our traffic since launching our public forum, and a big contributing factor was these additional URLs (over 30,000 low-quality URLs were added to our sitemap over the course of 12 months, simply because of the replies that were left in each topic).

how were you able to determine that this was a significant contributor? a lot of SEO posts made here have been fairly speculative, so some evidence goes a long way!

I have no experience with this plugin and can’t vouch for it personally, but someone has attempted to disable canonical links entirely with a plugin before: Remove Canonical Link Plugin