Should I still worry about paginated comments with the latest wordpress versions?

Since wp 2.7, wordpress has introduced the paginated comments feature.
I’ve read that this may not be good for SEO as the main content gets “duplicated” on the pages of the comments.

Then I’ve read that to prevent this, we can specify the canonical URL in meta tags.

Now i’ve checked the source of my page and a canonical url is automatically added and reads like this on the pages of the comment:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://localhost/wp16/?p=3657" /> 

So am I cool? I shouldn’t worry about dup content? This is actually from the twentyten theme and I am not sure if this feature (the showing up of the canonical meta) was recently added or was always there.

Thanks.

Don’t worry about the duplicated content issue. First of all, the canonical link fixes most browsers and search engine crawlers that will be reading your site (and it’s actually been there for a while).

Second, the alleged “duplicate content penalty” that people have told you about (the things you’ve read that say it’s bad for SEO) is a myth. Google developers have been quoted repeatedly as saying so. Here’s a great article that references them and explains it in more detail than I care to go into.

So yes, you’re fine. Don’t worry about paginated comments on your site. They actually make the experience better for the user and don’t harm your SEO score.