comments causing 500 error for googlebot

  • wildernessdave

    (@wildernessdave)


    5 years, 9 months ago

    I have been trying to figure out why google can’t crawl over 100 posts on my website and I think I have finally figured out what is causing the issue. All the posts that the googlebot can’t crawl have comments. However, when I upgraded to the newest version of wordpress a few months ago I think it broke the comments. The comments do not display at the bottom of the post it just says comment 5 or comment 1 or however many comments the post has had.

    To test this I unapproved the comments on a post that google could not index and then resubmitted that post to google and google was able to successfully crawl that post, after the comments were removed.

    The site is using an old theme by thematic. I know I need to update the site and use a new theme because thematic has not been upgraded or supported for several years, but I am looking for a quick solution so that my pages can be reindexed by google. We have lost 90% of our search traffic because of the 500 errors for the posts effected.

    Could I just replace the comments.php file with a file from a newer theme that is compatible with current versions of wordpress, or just delete the comments.php to remove all comments?

    Or is there a plugin, or a setting in wordpress to turn off comments from all posts, including those already made?

    Thank you for any help you can provide.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    5 years, 9 months ago

    This should close comments for all posts:
    add_filter( 'comments_open', '__return_false' );
    but I don’t think it’ll help due to existing comments. I recommend disabling the portion of the theme template that displays comments as a stop gap measure. How and where this is done varies by theme. It’s often a call to comments_template() where the line can simply be commented out. This does not actually prevent comments, but it prevents the comments and comment form from being displayed. (a knowledgeable user could still submit comments without the form)

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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