On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:23 AM, The Gadget Doctor < mediawiki@thegadgetdoctor.com> wrote:

I'm getting serious about SEO with a forthcoming site and I was thinking about all the edit links on my pages. I really don't want google or others crawling these links and I have stopped that with robots.txt. But, is there any way (without me hacking the core MW code) to put a rel="nofollow" directive in links pointing to action=edit pages?

I'm currently achieving this in the following way:

my Robots.txt file has the following line: Disallow: w/

And my wiki lives in w/. However, I've set up nice URLs so that the pages are read via mywki/ . This then catches all links to unwritten pages (because these refer to the w/ ) and also print links and so on. I'm wondering if this is a good solution long term. I'm also using Sitemaps properly to make sure every page can be found and "good" links that point to content already written are found and followed by search engines.

Thoughts anyone?

Nofollow is no more effective than robots.txt, and unwritten pages are already marked with noindex. Wikipedia seems to be doing alright with the search engines. :)