On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 19:09 +0000, Timwi wrote:
I think it'd be useful for most multilingual MediaWiki installations that use interlanguage links to have such hidden <link> elements.
Speaking of which - this reminds me of an idea I had a while ago and I was wondering if anyone would be interested to hear this. Currently many Wikipedia pages in Google search results are redirects (for example, Google for "nonogram" and look at the seventh search result). I was wondering if there is a <link> element one could use to say that another URL is the "real" page? Then the page returned for a redirect's URL would tell search engines the URL of the page it's redirecting to.
I'm not aware of any <link> syntax, but one way to do it would be for MediaWiki to issue an HTTP 301 status (permanent redirect) to the new page, rather than returning 200 and giving the content. That probably introduces an unacceptably large performance penalty, though (extra round trip per request).
The "Content-Location" HTTP header is a potential longshot. I don't think Google documents their use/non-use of this header, but it's one of those "can't hurt" kind of things.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.14
It appears it can be tacked on using a meta http-equiv tag in the HTML head.
Rob