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.
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
Steps to get to DoneDone
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Create and Stage branch locally -
Reading and understanding: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61050&topic=8846 -
Understand this task -
Understand how BeforePageDisplay works! -
Write extension to add meta tags to our redirect page. -
Find out if a page redirects to another page. -
Extract Article from OutputPage - Test out the extension thoroughly.
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Find appropriate place to add our code. -
Roll out and deploy Stage 1 ... verify that it works as expected -
Reading and understanding Comparisons of 301 or 302 redirects-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Redirect there is a code snippet to address thisThe hack provided here has also been applied. However, the target page doesn't show any trace of 'from where' has it been redirected. -
http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/477/index.php -
http://oyoy.eu/huh/redirects/
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Understand Stage 2 of this task -
Roll out and deploy Stage 2 ... verify that it works as expected - Test the functionality well on local server.
- Stage it on Staging Server.
- Merge with live and deploy.