Eric K wrote:
70% of web traffic on any page of my wiki (I assume
the same is true for most other wikis and sites) comes from a search engine. In search
results, people see two things and use them to decide in a few seconds whether to click on
the link or not:
1- page title
2- meta tag description (if defined) OR the first sentence of the page.
#1, the page title is fine in Mediawiki. It is: {{PAGENAME}} - "the wiki
name".
#2 is not right. For example if we search "America", we see:
- "This article is about the United States of America. For other uses of terms
redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), ..."
Ideally this should be something that the editors put into the page like other article
text.Let them handle the description such as "An article about the USA, its history,
government and politics, culture, economy and other topics". This is better than the
disamb. notice that comes up currently in search.
We can install an external extension to define meta description however this should be a
built-in feature of Mediawiki where people should be able to use: <metadesc> for
making sure our search engine results are what we want them to be.
Eric
I'm not sure it's a good idea. This way And it isn't that bad. You
search for America and see that it's about America, the United States of
America.
You could have a different disambiguation convention on your site.
I agree though that those texts shouldn't appear if you don't come via a
redirection.
For people wanting metas:
*http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Add_Metas
*http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Advanced_Meta
*http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MetaKeywordsTag
*http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Add_HTML_Meta_and_Title