Lars Aronsson wrote:
But shouldn't rel="nofollow" also be used for the edit, history and diff links? These pages avoid Google indexing by having the
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> tag in their <head> section, but Google only sees that after having visited the page. The visits by Google to these pages are not productive, but still add load on Wikipedia's servers, and this could be avoided by adding rel=nofollow on the edit, history and diff links.
They don't add load on Wikipedia's servers because they're locked off by our robots.txt.
It's also not clear whether or not rel="nofollow" actually tells Google not to spider the page, or simply not to count the link for pagerank. If you can find a clear spec for this, let me know.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)