On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@gmail.com wrote:
A couple of months ago, I raised on this list the issue of "no-indexing" Wikipedia pages outside the mainspace, principally including
project-space
pages such as XfDs, AN/ANI, RfA's, RfAr's, and the like, but possibly including userspace as well. By no-indexing, I refer to coding these
pages
such that they will not be picked up by Google or other search engines.
Note that much of this is already done, see our robots file:
http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
Currently all AFD, RFA, RFC and RFAR subpages (but not the main AFD page, the main RFA page etc) are blocked from indexing. Of your examples the admin noticeboard and userspace are probably the big examples of pages that are still indexed that we might not want to be so.
Just to pick everyone's favorite topic as an example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pwst=1&q=+site:en.wikipedia.org+%...
What is the benefit to allowing Google to index DRV, talk pages, and user/user talk pages? Aside from the Mediawiki native search function not being always that great, the only negative to blocking or restricting Search Engines to just cover strictly Article space would be a possible loss of Google Juice, which should not a concern.
- Joe