Re: [WikimediaMobile] [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

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Zero showing up in search results?

Adam Baso

28 May 2013 28 May '13

8:49 p.m.

Hello All, We had shelved my patch, patch 64629 <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/64629>, in hopes that an earlier patch, patch 61809<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/61809>(bug 35233 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=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 <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/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(a)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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog. On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

-- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

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James Alexander

28 May 28 May

8:53 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

At some level there seems to be a change in google (or our) settings that are doing this everywhere. I've also been seeing a lot of links indexed and appearing in google as the primary domain too (wikipedia.org/wiki/Bostonrather then en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston, seen it on Wikivoyage as well and I assume the others). At some level we're probably going to want to figure out what's happening because at some point down the road 'something' changed just not sure on what side. James Alexander Legal and Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Adam Baso <abaso(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog. On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

-- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

_______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

James Alexander

8:58 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

Sorry for the double post: For what it's worth .... It does not appear that we have a canonical url appearing on most pages. Mobile has canonical pointing to the main site but neither zero or the main site have a canonical expressly stated. James Alexander Legal and Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:53 PM, James Alexander <jalexander(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:

...

Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog. On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)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 > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

-- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

_______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

Adam Baso

29 May 29 May

1:26 a.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

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.orglinks 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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog. On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

-- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

Yuri Astrakhan

1:35 a.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

Does it make sense to get rid of zero altogether? We could keep zero for the known IP ranges of our partners, but for everyone else do an automatic redirect to "m"? And yes, I think we should get rid of "m" too, but that's a separate discussion. On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 9:26 PM, Adam Baso <abaso(a)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.orglinks within the next 30 days. I still find it strange that there are <language>.zero.wikipedia.orglinks 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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

-- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

_______________________________________________ Mobile-l mailing list Mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

Federico Leva (Nemo)

3:10 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

I don't know if there's a general bug report about canonical URLs & co. indexing, but there's one about Google messing up with 301/302 redirects which is spreading quite a bit lately. Erik wrote them to no avail some time ago. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26115 Nemo

Erik Moeller

3:15 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 8:10 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Actually none of the examples in the bug still return the reported results for me. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Adam Baso

18 Jun 18 Jun

10:35 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

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(a)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.orglinks within the next 30 days. I still find it strange that there are <language>.zero.wikipedia.orglinks 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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

-- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

Adam Baso

26 Jun 26 Jun

5:59 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

(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(a)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.orglinks within the next 30 days. I still find it strange that there are <language>.zero.wikipedia.orglinks 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(a)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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: > Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog. > > On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)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 > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikimedia-l mailing list > > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l > -- Kul Wadhwa Head of Mobile Wikimedia Foundation

Adam Baso

28 Aug 28 Aug

6:45 p.m.

New subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia Zero in Google search result

(cross-posted on mobile-l) Update: I have been checking on the indexed link count over the last couple of months, and it has been roughly constant. Upon another check in the past week, it looked like it was time to go ahead with the robots.txt update. Just yesterday, the start of a robots.txt entry for <lang>. zero.wikipedia.org has also been updated to instruct all robots like Googlebot to not index <lang>.zero.wikipedia.org. Looks like even more <lang>.zero.wikipedia.org pages may already be starting to fall out of the index. Thanks for flagging this! Will keep watching the indexed links count as it dwindles. Thanks again. -Adam On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Adam Baso <abaso(a)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.orglinks within the next 30 days. I still find it strange that there are <language>.zero.wikipedia.orglinks 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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hello All, We had shelved my patch, patch 64629<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/64629>29>, in hopes that an earlier patch, patch 61809<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/61809>(bug 35233 <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=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<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote: > >> Looping Dan Foy in who's managing the Zero backlog. >> >> On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 8:01 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)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 >> > >> > >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Wikimedia-l mailing list >> > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> > Unsubscribe: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikimedia-l mailing list >> Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l >> > > > > -- > Kul Wadhwa > Head of Mobile > Wikimedia Foundation >

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Adam Baso
Erik Moeller
Federico Leva (Nemo)
James Alexander
Yuri Astrakhan