Rob Lanphier wrote:
On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 19:09 +0000, Timwi wrote:
Speaking of which - this reminds me of an idea I
had a while ago and I
was wondering if anyone would be interested to hear this. Currently many
Wikipedia pages in Google search results are redirects (for example,
Google for "nonogram" and look at the seventh search result). I was
wondering if there is a <link> element one could use to say that another
URL is the "real" page? Then the page returned for a redirect's URL
would tell search engines the URL of the page it's redirecting to.
I'm not aware of any <link> syntax, but one way to do it would be for
MediaWiki to issue an HTTP 301 status (permanent redirect) to the new
page, rather than returning 200 and giving the content. That probably
introduces an unacceptably large performance penalty, though (extra
round trip per request).
It's not a performance issue at all, and round-trips for 301s are often
cheap compared to rendering.
It just makes it a lot harder to deal with such pages: if you
HTTP-redirect straight to the target page you're missing the link back
to the redirect page. (And that is *crucial* for editing work and
vandalism cleanup. It is non-negotiable.)
If you redirect to an alternate URL which includes the linkback address,
then a) it's an uglier URL and b) you don't get the alleged benefits of
going to the single target URL in the first place.
We've actually discussed this many times before; please search the list
archives if you wish to comment further. :)
The "Content-Location" HTTP header is a
potential longshot. I don't
think Google documents their use/non-use of this header, but it's one of
those "can't hurt" kind of things.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.14
The spec is sufficiently vague and mysterious that I'd recommend against
using it for any purpose. Since the destination page would not return
the same HTML as the redirect page, it would likely be incorrect and
might cause problems if anything does use it.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)