ShakataGaNai recently discovered that it appears we are no longer being syndicated by google news as of september 16. Anyways, thought i'd mail the list in case people are wondering why we dissapeared off google news.
The cause appears to be do to changes in mediawiki, giving the googlebot the noindex flag. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20818 .
-- - Bawolff Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
As a clarification, if you check Google News ( http://news.google.com/news/search?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&...), you will see a few results after the 16th come up. These are all articles with at least 3 numbers in their titles. It just so happens that on the 16th there was a software rollout where they added a sensible feature that screwed up. ::shrugs::
That being said, it sucks that we're temporarily Google News-less, but try not to piss off the dev's too much. Obviously it isn't the end of the world if it took 9 days to be noticed (I found this about 24 hours ago). Hopefully with some votes to the bug we can get this fixed.
In the mean time, I don't think we should bother with the crazy date hacks or what not that we've done before. IMHO that stuff caused more problems that it was worth.
-Jon
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 00:33, bawolff <bawolff+wn@gmail.combawolff%2Bwn@gmail.com
wrote:
ShakataGaNai recently discovered that it appears we are no longer being syndicated by google news as of september 16. Anyways, thought i'd mail the list in case people are wondering why we dissapeared off google news.
The cause appears to be do to changes in mediawiki, giving the googlebot the noindex flag. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20818 .
--
- Bawolff
Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
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And what can we do to fix this? brianmc last I knew had a contact at Google News...or at least a live person. This upsets me though.
It's not Google News' fault, it's ours (technically). The short version is that someone changed MediaWiki to tells the bots not to index any page when using ?currid=12345 to access it. The normal (non ?currid) version still works fine.
So what can we do to fix this? Get a dev to either undo this, or create a work around for us.
-Jon
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 12:42, Jason Safoutin <jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org
wrote:
And what can we do to fix this? brianmc last I knew had a contact at Google News...or at least a live person. This upsets me though.
-- Jason Safoutin Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org
bawolff wrote:
ShakataGaNai recently discovered that it appears we are no longer being syndicated by google news as of september 16. Anyways, thought i'd mail the list in case people are wondering why we dissapeared off google news.
The cause appears to be do to changes in mediawiki, giving the googlebot the noindex flag. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20818 .
--
- Bawolff
Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
Wikinews-l mailing list Wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
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