On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 04:46 +0000, Risker wrote:
Our rankings for policies, guidelines and essays are all out of proportion to their importance in the real world, and frankly should not be the first hit for someone looking for general information on the subject. They should definitely be available for searching within Wikipedia, but they do not need to be in the top-10 google hits - ever. They pertain only to the process of editing Wikipedia and have no bearing on any other aspect of the world.
If pages (whatever pages) are ranked far out of proportion to their real world importance, or real world popularity, then that's the fault of the search engine to fix, not the content provider end.
Do something need to be in the top-XX (insert one's favourite search engine) hits? That's up to the search engine, and the people who chooses to use that search engine. If the search engine is listing things in a bad order, then it won't take very long for internet user to jump ship to a better one.
If something should be searchable within the wiki, then why shouldn't it be searchable outwith that wiki? Here you are saying "I want this to be found, but I don't want you find find it via there, but only here". That's just making the job of the person searching harder, without actually achieving whatever it is you wanted to achieve.
The solution of a magic _NOINDEX_ on page we don't want index for whatever reason is great, and achieve what's wanted, as long as it mean that it's not index by _any_ search (that follows rules anyway).
KTC