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

[Joe Szilagyi]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)
> <newyorkbrad at gmail.com> wrote:
> > A couple of months ago, I raised on this list the issue of "no-indexing"
> > Wikipedia pages outside the mainspace, principally including
> project-space
> > pages such as XfDs, AN/ANI, RfA's, RfAr's, and the like, but possibly
> > including userspace as well.  By no-indexing, I refer to coding these
> pages
> > such that they will not be picked up by Google or other search engines.
>
> Note that much of this is already done, see our robots file:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
>
> Currently all AFD, RFA, RFC and RFAR subpages (but not the main AFD
> page, the main RFA page etc) are blocked from indexing. Of your
> examples the admin noticeboard and userspace are probably the big
> examples of pages that are still indexed that we might not want to be
> so.
>

Just to pick everyone's favorite topic as an example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pwst=1&q=+site:en.wikipedia.org+%22Articles+for+deletion%22+Brandt+wikipedia

What is the benefit to allowing Google to index DRV, talk pages, and
user/user talk pages? Aside from the Mediawiki native search function not
being always that great, the only negative to blocking or restricting Search
Engines to just cover strictly Article space would be a possible loss of
Google Juice, which should not a concern.

- Joe