Hello!
In this thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Userpage_drafts_shown_in_search_engines, there was a discussion about indexing of user space by search engines. In a nutshell, user space pages are not subject to content policies so that users can write drafts freely, and having those pages indexed by search engines like Google is viewed as problematic since those pages can seem fairly official.
I seem to recall that it was not the default in the past that user pages were indexed by search engines. I'm trying to figure out if there's some other cause for this that's happened recently, because I'd prefer to avoid piling hacks on and not address the root issue.
Does anyone know of anything that's changed recently that might've changed the way that search engines index user space?
Thanks, Dan