FixMediawikiRedirects
What (summary)
Improve our traffic from search engines by not indexing redirect pages.
Why this is important
It will increase our traffic by improving our search engine rankings.
We like to use redirects because they help people find content using any of the names that make sense to them. However, our rampant use of redirects creates a huge amount of duplication. For example, http://www.aboutus.org/NutraThai.com is the canonical page but http://www.aboutus.org/NutraThai shows almost exactly the same content. Search engines decrease page rank for pages with duplicated content. We want to eliminate the appearence of having duplicate content.
People also link from their sites to pages on AboutUs. When they link to a redirect rather than the canonical page, the page rank accrues to the wrong place. If the url bar shows only canonical urls (not redirects) people will bookmark and link to the canonical url more frequently. The users hit/bookmark either the Canonical URL or Redirecting URL, this has nothing to do with the page rank of the canonical page, since redirecting page is redirecting (301) to the target page. So this functionality (which was implemented before) has been removed. Moreover, earlier we had to put a redirect=no to that URL (to prevent multiple redirections) which messed up with the url (made it something like: http://aboutus.org/index.php?title=RedirectingURL&redirect=no) which is no better than http://aboutus.org/RedirectingURL. We don't our users to bookmark the former URL.
DoneDone
Stage 1
- Pages that MediaWiki redirects should include a <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> in the header so that they don't look like duplicate content to google and other search engines
- http://www.google.com/search?q=nutrathai.com
- http://www.aboutus.org/NutraThai NOWHERE in the search results
- http://www.aboutus.org/NutraThai_Limited NOWHERE in the search results
- http://www.aboutus.org/NutraThai.com high in the search results
Stage 2
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Pages that MediaWiki redirects should issue a 301 "moved permanently" or a 302 "moved temporarily" (I believe the 301 "moved permanently" is the correct code to use. Write up a convincing argument for 301 vs 302)It should be 301 "moved permanently" which is search engines friendly and they do not index the redirect page. Having set it to 301, is there any need left to add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> on the redirect pages? as search engines 'by default' do not index them and migrate its values to the target page.-
Consider what happens when a 301 turns back into a 200? Can we undo redirects if we use the 301?Yes, by using redirect=no flag -
Do the search engines penalize 302 redirects? Could using 302s make us look like bad actors?Yes, search engines do penalize 302 redirects, business.com is the proof.
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the redirect=no flag is respected by mediawiki (no 301 or 302 when used) so that we can see and edit the redirect pagesThis functionality still prevails -
the "what links here list" continues to have redirect=no in the links for redirect pages -
"This page has been redirected from ... " is shown on the target page.
Steps to get to DoneDone
-
enable the breadcrumbs and test if they work properly.No need -
Read article on http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html -
Read and understand http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html -
Read and understand http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431&query=google+index+urls%3F&topic=&type= -
Read and understand http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/google/indexing.php -
Read and understand http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=82298&query=google+index+urls%3F&topic=&type= -
Read and understand http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 -
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en -
Understand how Google indexes pages.- On Page title?
- On URL?
- On Both?
- Any other?
Concerns
something's wrong
check this link? http://www.aboutus.org/Special:Whatredirectshere/Portal:AboutUsFeatureMe
see "featured" redirects to the portal, which I'm sure is correct, but then under that are many images, which redirect elsewhere
seem like a bug?
- Here's another one. User:MarkDilley doesnt redirect to User:TedErnst, but it's there in this list: http://www.aboutus.org/Special:Whatredirectshere/User:TedErnst TedErnst (talk) 08:45, 20 February 2008 (PST)
