[WikiEN-l] Site search

Thu Sep 15 16:48:42 UTC 2005

I don't know enough about the algorithm Google uses to make this call. 

There are various meta tags you can add to a page which will make
Google behave differently to it. Noindex makes it so that Google won't
index a page; noarchive means it won't archive it in the Google cache;
and nofollow means it won't follow any of the links on the page.

The problem is I'm not sure if they are mutually exclusive. Will a
noindex automatically noarchive? Probably. But will a noindex
automatically nofollow? I don't know. We would want them to follow --
that is, we want them to know that the redirect term links up with
that specific page -- but we wouldn't want them to index.

But if noindex also implies a nofollow, then it wouldn't be worth
doing -- not so much because it would hurt our Google pagerank, but
more because it would not help people find the articles they were
looking for, potentially. Again, it's hard to know how these things
would affect things without experimentation.

Either way, it's not a crucial, needs-to-be-decidedly-immediately
issue. It's a tiny piece of potential inelegance in a project which is
often defined by its inelegance. ;-)

FF

On 9/14/05, Pawe³ Dembowski <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> > Google indexes redirect pages? Could something be added to the code of
> > redirect pages to tell the search engine spiders to skip over them?
> > Would this make searching for pages on Wiki through google work
> > better?
> 
> Not really, it would give us less google hits. It would be better if
> Google indexed redirect pages and the target page as one page.
> 
> --
> Ausir
> Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
> http://pl.wikipedia.org
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