Hi Daniel, thank you for your very helpful response.
I wasn't requesting a change to the MediaWiki core, but rather a way to adjust a specific Wiki. On my wiki of less than 1000 articles, we use redirects mostly for shortcuts to high usage pages that can be easily remembered or pasted into our forum or chat room. From this perspective and with our non-technical users, having second line of the page be "Redirected from {x}" is a disadvantage. Further, given how common 301-based link shorteners are, a 301 might be a more accurate reflection of how the short links are actually used on our site.
While this may contradict intuitions related to other sites, there are times when I think it's appropriate to trust a specific webmaster regarding their site and their audience. I've put considerably more than 10,000 hours into this site and believe that while 301s might not work on Wikimedia sites or other wikis, they might be right for us. To some degree it's moot, as it most definitely isn't a priority for us.
My concern regarding PageRank equivocality was with the arguments raised in this linkhttp://christopher.wendels.net/seo/matt-cutts-relcanonicaled-pages-can-pass-pagerank/, based on a Cutts video more recent than the other two. From my perspective, everything Matt says has an element of equivocality to it. He tends to speak metaphorically and generally talks about how things are done now, but makes no warranty regarding whether things might change. That being said, the links you provide are excellent and better than mine, so I'm happy to concede the point.
Thanks again for the help.
Forest
Use Google technology to search 10,000 pages about TMS: search.tmswiki.orghttp://Search.tmswiki.org . Want to see what I'm working on? Click herehttp://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/3368/. (link fixed)
On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Daniel Friesen daniel@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote:
On 2014-02-07 5:14 PM, Forest S wrote:
Hello, is it possible to modify Mediawiki so that when you do a
#REDIRECT,
it sends an HTTP 301 or 302 redirect to the target page? Currently, it
just
returns HTTP 200 (OK), along with a near duplicate of the target's HTML.
The HTML that it returns includes a rel="canonical" link to the target page, but Google has been equivocal about whether this passes as much PageRank as an HTTP redirect, so I'd like to know if an HTTP redirect to the target page is an option.
Cheers, Forest
Equivocal? https://youtu.be/Cm9onOGTgeM?t=13m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA (does forget to mention rel=canonical for "slightly different duplicate pages")
They seem to be quite clear that 301 redirects and rel=canonical links are practically the same as far as PageRank goes for our purposes.
Hell Wikia was one of Google's original test cases when they were implementing rel=canonical support. https://youtu.be/Cm9onOGTgeM?t=18m43s
People have brought up making redirects do 301s many times before. Wikia even tried doing it once, garnering lots of bugs, complains, and annoyance from the communities. But so far every single suggestion that people have made on how to handle the "Redirected from {x}" has had some fundamental flaw the author didn't think of that makes it an unacceptable alternative to rel=canonical. Cookies, query parameters, referers (sic), and so on have all been suggested, and flopped.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
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