[Mediawiki-l] rel=nofollow for edit, history and diff links

Fri Apr 29 21:07:06 UTC 2005

I've noticed that Wikipedia now adds rel="nofollow" to user 
contributed URLs, so that [http://myurl.com/ website]
becomes <a href="http://myurl.com/" rel="nofollow" >website</a>.

The rel="nofollow" attribute was (unofficially?) announced by 
Google in January this year, as a means to fight link spam in 
blogs, wikis and guest books.

But shouldn't rel="nofollow" also be used for the edit, history 
and diff links?  These pages avoid Google indexing by having the 
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> tag in their 
<head> section, but Google only sees that after having visited the 
page.  The visits by Google to these pages are not productive, but 
still add load on Wikipedia's servers, and this could be avoided 
by adding rel=nofollow on the edit, history and diff links.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se