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

Fri Apr 29 21:08:41 UTC 2005

Lars Aronsson wrote in news.gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki:
> 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.

i didn't look at nofollow too closely, but my impression was that
(despite the name), Google would still follow the link, but not
assign it any pagerank based on that particular link.

in any case, generated pages should be denied to Google via robots.txt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt

kate.

(cue discussion about whether nofollow is the devil and will destroy
the intarweb.)