Auto Loading and incorrect SEO-information for web-crawlers

I have done a little bit more research regarding this “issue” (as started in this thread) and just wanted to share my thoughts to be forwarded to developers, or if anyone can give me an answer right now.

• Basically, whenever auto loading is enabled, as soon as a user scrolls the page any URL ending (#comments, #respond etc.) gets replaced with the actual article url (for example: http://www.mysite.com/my-article). Instead of retaining the “#-ending”.

• This is also true for the canonical URLs that gets seen by the browser when selecting “view source”. Hence the #comments, #respond etc. never seems to be in the actual URL for webcrawlers to find.

• All the above does also apply, not only paginated comments, but to normal paginated posts. When using the built in WordPress-function for pagination (<!–nextpage–>) this results in that no matter which page of a paginated post a user is at, it will always be displayed in the code as (ex.) http://www.mysite.com/my-article, instead of http://www.mysite.com/my-article/2, http://www.mysite.com/my-article/3 etc.

• Using the above approach it also results in that the link rel=”next” is always http://www.mysite.com/my-article/2 no matter if the next page is actually /3, /4, /5 etc. It also makes the link rel=”prev“ never appear since the page always believes that it is the first page in a series of pages because of the URL change.

I´m far from an expert at SEO but this clearly must be something that will confuse web-crawlers and have an impact on SEO. A lot of confusion must also arise for the crawlers when the same page URL have completely different content (as it will be for paginated posts and for paginated comments).

Would be great with some answers regarding this topic. I would love to enable the auto loading function since it´s great for decreasing bounce rate and making visitors stay longer. But right now I´m to scared for the possible SEO side-effects of doing so.

• This topic was modified 6 years by MrOrsh.
• This topic was modified 6 years by MrOrsh.

Thank you 🙂

Is there any ETA date for the next update btw? Thanks!