In my experience they do crawl wikis very efficiently. I find MediaWiki in particular to be very well indexed by the search engines; for our wiki in particular both Google and Yahoo indexes the wiki extremely well.
I haven't made the slightest effort on the technical side to make this happen, but I have tried to get our wiki linked to from other sites, although not even to any great length. I guess you just have to spread the word a bit around and make sure your site is linked to from at least a couple of places. If your content is quality content and linked to from quality sites (i.e. getting a good google-rating), it will show up on the search engines in a matter of months.
I have noticed, however, that it seems mostly main namespace content appears in the search engines, I think I have yet to see a discussion page or image page appearing, even if searching for terms very relevant to these kind of pages. Is there a default setting which excludes some namespaces from being indexed?
Best wishes, Morten :-)
-- Crews Cut Production Morten Blaabjerg http://morten.crewscut.com morten@crewscut.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike" mike@inter-change.com To: mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2006 8:58 PM Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Search Engines Not Spidering Wiki Sites
FROM: Mike Hammond
Do you have to put a .htaccess file with just:
RewriteEngine On
to get searche engines to spider the wiki?
Currently searche engines are spidering the html pages but not the wiki database php information!
Best wishes.
Mike _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l