On 5/17/06, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
Looking at the patch, it seems to me that a better solution would handle both NOINDEX *and* NOFOLLOW.
Certainly, most namespaces should be indexed, while "User" and "User talk" should probably never be indexed or followed. Meanwhile, "Wikipedia" and "Wikipedia talk" should probably always be both indexed and followed, as the problem of spam links is low, but valuable cross-wiki links is high.
The incidence of uncaught spam in everything except main (i.e. including main talk) is *much* higher than in main. I'm not aware of anyone that really protests nofollow in those other NSes. User pages are probably the worst, because no only are people not paying attention, they feel compelled not to remove spam when they see it... but the problem is pretty significant in other NSes too.
Noindex will impact the use of google to find interior pages and shouldn't be done until our own search engine is more functional. Eventually we *should* turn it on.. if nothing else than to avoid confusing random outsiders with our sausage making (just as we've done with the AFD pages).