(cross-posted on mobile-l)

Okay, looks like the index of zero.wikipedia.org pages in Google has shrunk by some 20 million entries. Nonetheless, a number of really old pages (e.g., going back to 6-May-2013) are still in the Google index with article text. I'll set a reminder to check on the Google index again in 30 days, and hopefully then we can finally put the no-index rules in place at that time.

The good news is that many of the pages are now correctly suppressed in natural search as non-canonical pages. In other words, a user would need to go through omitted results or do a site:<domain> search to see them.

-Adam

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Update:

We've added an enhancement to Wikipedia Zero so that if a user who isn't on a participating carrier network navigates to a Wikipedia Zero page on <language>.zero.wikipedia.org, such as http://en.zero.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_%28band%29 , the user will be presented an option to visit the canonical URL of the article. If clicked, the canonical URL should get the user to the mobile or desktop version of the page, based on device type.

We're hoping that by next week the Google index will be refreshed so as to correctly mark the <language>.zero.wikipedia.org pages as duplicate pages in the omitted section. Upon confirmation of as much, the current plan is to introduce https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/69420/ to prevent indexing of <language>.zero.wikipedia.org altogether.

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:

All,

My mistake. The pages in Google's index that I used for sampling - the ones that have "Sorry, ..." in their description in Google search results - are cached pages. I assumed incorrectly that those pages were based on recent indexing (e.g., in the past few days).

I think we can actually stick to the original plan of Google re-indexing and the search results de-emphasizing the <language>.zero.wikipedia.org links within the next 30 days.

I still find it strange that there are <language>.zero.wikipedia.org links that turned up higher in the search engine rankings than their better-established <language>.wikipedia.org counterparts. But I suppose with fewer competing page elements, especially on long-tail articles with fewer or no direct links to the desktop page, this is maybe not totally unexpected.

-Adam

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hello All,

We had shelved my patch, patch 64629, in hopes that an earlier patch, patch 61809 (bug 35233), would resolve the issue naturally as Google re-indexed. But it appears Google has re-indexed and yet the .zero.wikipedia.org URLs are still  present in Google's index, instead of the <language>.wikipedia.org URLs.

I have thus resubmitted patch 64629 for re-review. We will need to further discuss whether it is appropriate to have Google completely remove .zero.wikipedia.org links from their cache, or if perhaps we need to open a support thread with Google about canonical URLs.

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Kul Wadhwa <kwadhwa@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Adam Baso (copied on this email) is working on it and a fix is ready. He'll do some testing to make sure it's resolved.

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Tomasz Finc <tfinc@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog.

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> K. Peachey wrote:
>>Can you please file this in bugzilla <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org>?
>
> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48856
>
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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Kul Wadhwa
Head of Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation