[WikiEN-l] No-indexing of project-space pages

[Anthony]

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Jonathan Hughes <lifebaka at gmail.com> wrote:

> One thing no-indexing user and user talk namespaces would help with is to
> curb the recent trend of userpage spam.  I see half a dozen or more
> userpages a day which are spam or masquerading as articles.  If userspace
> wasn't indexed, pretty soon the companies/persons who attempt this sort of
> advertising will figure out it doesn't work; no one ever finds their
> "article" from Google or Yahoo.
>
> The most recent example that springs into my mind is [[User:Kliff Hanger
> Dot
> Com]] (whose page I didn't think spamish enough to delete, though I still
> blanked it), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kliff_Hanger_Dot_Com .
> There's no question that page should not be sitting around in userspace
> where people can Google it.


Do you really think noindexing of user pages would make any difference
there?  The page is obviously self-promotional, but I would think the
purpose is more to promote oneself to Wikipedians, not to random Google
searchers.

I don't even agree with you that "there's no question" that user page
shoudn't be in Google.  Wikipedians seem to have chosen to not allow certain
types of self-promotion on user pages, but that's by no means a policy which
is beyond question.  Most websites *allow* blatant self-promotion on
people's user page equivalents - for example, Google Knol certainly wouldn't
delete a page like this, and they wouldn't noindex it either.  Unless
there's some other info I'm missing, I'd assume good faith here and give the
person who created that page the benefit of the doubt; assume that they
weren't aware of the rules and thought there was nothing wrong with what
they were doing.  (As an aside, had the user chosen the username "Klff
Hanger", and made a few contributions to articles, I don't even see a rules
violation, though I admit I'm not up to date on the current !rules.  I can
think of lots of user pages which are self-promotional.)

Of course, this brings up another issue, which I think is the real problem
with indexing user and user talk pages (as well as project and project talk
pages).  User pages probably *should* be in search engines, they just
shouldn't be ranked nearly as highly as they tend to be.

In hindsight, these pages probably should have been put on a different
domain name, and probably a single domain name for all users in all
projects.  That's probably a long way off if it ever gets implemented at all
(with SUL now mostly? complete it's a possibility), but one thing that can
be done today is that nofollow can be applied to links to these pages.  Then
at least the search engines will give them a lower rank.  Maybe I should
submit a couple bug reports.