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

Fri Apr 29 21:13:13 UTC 2005

On 4/29/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> 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.

Edit, history, and diff pages are served from /w/ urls, which
robots.txt disallows for all user-agents that obey the robots
protocol. So google doesn't visit these pages at all.

-- 
John Fader