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/]