Last modified: 2013-03-10 11:22:33 UTC
It appears that cross-wiki links are getting indexed by Google. But Google should be paying attention to them at the wiki where they live, not the wiki from which they are linked. For instance, I left an interwiki link on an English Wikipedia user talk page[1], to a Wikisource page. The Google results are showing this as a Wikipedia page, rather than a Wikisource page. (It goes to the right place, but is not listing Wikisource as the destination.) I think the best thing would be for interwiki links to have the "noindex" set, but not "nofollow" -- that is, search engine spiders would correctly understand that the destination page is the proper URL to index, not the outgoing link. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Valfontis/Archive_16#Airlie (see the third link under the "Airlie" section) [2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_narrow_gauge_railroad_in_the_Willamette_Valley [3] https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=history+of+the+narrow+gauge+railroad&oq=history+of+the+narrow+gauge+railroad&sugexp=chrome,mod=19&client=ubuntu&channel=cs&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&client=ubuntu&hs=pxr&tbo=d&channel=cs&sclient=psy-ab&q=history+of+the+narrow+gauge+railroad+in+the+willamette&oq=history+of+the+narrow+gauge+railroad+in+the+willamette&gs_l=serp.3...547990.554978.1.555182.30.17.0.0.0.0.344.522.0j1j0j1.2.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1.0gXsg9BVqGw&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.41248874,d.cGE&fp=6ff34c8bbab788b7&biw=1280&bih=667
No, that's not the problem: it's correct and desired that links are followed. See bug 26115 for the actual problem.
