On 4/29/05, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se 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.
Edit, history, and diff pages are served from /w/ urls, which robots.txt disallows for all user-agents that obey the robots protocol. So google doesn't visit these pages at all.