On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Newyorkbrad
(Wikipedia)
<newyorkbrad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> A couple of months ago, I raised on this list the issue of
"no-indexing"
Wikipedia
pages outside the mainspace, principally including
project-space
pages such as XfDs, AN/ANI, RfA's,
RfAr's, and the like, but possibly
including userspace as well. By no-indexing, I refer to coding these
pages
such that they will not be picked up by Google or
other search engines.
Note that much of this is already done, see our robots file:
http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
Currently all AFD, RFA, RFC and RFAR subpages (but not the main AFD
page, the main RFA page etc) are blocked from indexing. Of your
examples the admin noticeboard and userspace are probably the big
examples of pages that are still indexed that we might not want to be
so.
Just to pick everyone's favorite topic as an example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pwst=1&q=+site:en.wikipedia.org+…
What is the benefit to allowing Google to index DRV, talk pages, and
user/user talk pages? Aside from the Mediawiki native search function not
being always that great, the only negative to blocking or restricting
Search
Engines to just cover strictly Article space would be a possible loss of
Google Juice, which should not a concern.
- Joe