Hi Daniel, thank you for your very helpful response.
I wasn't requesting a change to the MediaWiki core, but rather a way to
adjust a specific Wiki. On my wiki of less than 1000 articles, we use
redirects mostly for shortcuts to high usage pages that can be easily
remembered or pasted into our forum or chat room. From this perspective and
with our non-technical users, having second line of the page be "Redirected
from {x}" is a disadvantage. Further, given how common 301-based link
shorteners are, a 301 might be a more accurate reflection of how the short
links are actually used on our site.
While this may contradict intuitions related to other sites, there are
times when I think it's appropriate to trust a specific webmaster regarding
their site and their audience. I've put considerably more than 10,000 hours
into this site and believe that while 301s might not work on Wikimedia
sites or other wikis, they might be right for us. To some degree it's moot,
as it most definitely isn't a priority for us.
My concern regarding PageRank equivocality was with the arguments
raised in this
link<http://christopher.wendels.net/seo/matt-cutts-relcanonicaled-pages-…k/>,
based on a Cutts video more recent than the other two. From my perspective,
everything Matt says has an element of equivocality to it. He tends to
speak metaphorically and generally talks about how things are done now, but
makes no warranty regarding whether things might change. That being said,
the links you provide are excellent and better than mine, so I'm happy to
concede the point.
Thanks again for the help.
Forest
Use Google technology to search 10,000 pages about TMS:
search.tmswiki.org<http://Search.tmswiki.org>
.
Want to see what I'm working on? Click
here<http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/3368/>8/>.
(link fixed)
On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:26 PM, Daniel Friesen
<daniel(a)nadir-seen-fire.com>wrote;wrote:
On 2014-02-07 5:14 PM, Forest S wrote:
Hello, is it possible to modify Mediawiki so that
when you do a
#REDIRECT,
it sends an HTTP 301 or 302 redirect to the
target page? Currently, it
just
returns HTTP 200 (OK), along with a near
duplicate of the target's HTML.
The HTML that it returns includes a rel="canonical" link to the target
page, but Google has been equivocal about whether this passes as much
PageRank as an HTTP redirect, so I'd like to know if an HTTP redirect to
the target page is an option.
Cheers,
Forest
Equivocal?
https://youtu.be/Cm9onOGTgeM?t=13m20s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA (does forget to mention
rel=canonical for "slightly different duplicate pages")
They seem to be quite clear that 301 redirects and rel=canonical links
are practically the same as far as PageRank goes for our purposes.
Hell Wikia was one of Google's original test cases when they were
implementing rel=canonical support.
https://youtu.be/Cm9onOGTgeM?t=18m43s
People have brought up making redirects do 301s many times before.
Wikia even tried doing it once, garnering lots of bugs, complains, and
annoyance from the communities.
But so far every single suggestion that people have made on how to
handle the "Redirected from {x}" has had some fundamental flaw the
author didn't think of that makes it an unacceptable alternative to
rel=canonical.
Cookies, query parameters, referers (sic), and so on have all been
suggested, and flopped.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://danielfriesen.name/]
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