[Mediawiki-l] rel=nofollow for edit, history and diff links

Fri Apr 29 21:10:45 UTC 2005

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> But shouldn't rel="nofollow" also be used for the edit, history
> and diff links?  These pages avoid Google indexing by having the
> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> tag in their
> <head> section, but Google only sees that after having visited the
> page.  The visits by Google to these pages are not productive, but
> still add load on Wikipedia's servers, and this could be avoided
> by adding rel=nofollow on the edit, history and diff links.

They don't add load on Wikipedia's servers because they're locked off by
our robots.txt.

It's also not clear whether or not rel="nofollow" actually tells Google
not to spider the page, or simply not to count the link for pagerank. If
you can find a clear spec for this, let me know.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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