Last modified: 2009-05-20 13:14:35 UTC

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Bug 8411 - Add "nofollow" to links to Special:Random on navigation panel and search engines
Add "nofollow" to links to Special:Random on navigation panel and search engines
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Interface (Other open bugs)
1.11.x
All All
: Low minor (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on:
Blocks: 17004
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2006-12-28 19:06 UTC by Dan Jacobson
Modified: 2009-05-20 13:14 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Dan Jacobson 2006-12-28 19:06:27 UTC
I can't believe Google is showing Special:Random as the second highest
match for a phrase at my wiki.

You perhaps will argue "Jacobson, check your marbles, we send HTTP/1.1
302 Found and Location: ..."

Well there was my page, in their index but with
...title=Special:Random as that page's URL. That's all I know.

The problem is in the navigation on each and every page, at
<li id="n-randompage"><a href="...Special:Random">

Never mind mentioning $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies = array(NS_SPECIAL...
as it doesn't affect links TO those pages (independent bug I also
dutifully submitted today).

So do right away fix this with a kludge on whatever produces that
navigation panel.

Don't wait for better overall solutions perhaps mentioned in my other
bugs today (the bug numbers of which I don't know as I write this
offline, to be sent to my batch posting script.)

Yes you might say "ho ho ho, Special:Random is only a tiny fraction of
the pages indexed at real wikis, vs. your puny wiki, Jacobson."

Yeah well don't call the doctor when your classmate clicks the link
for "Depression medicine" and gets the "Aggression medicine (Herbal)"
page, eats it, and cuts you to bits.

Ho hum, another day, another life saved with my erudite bug reports.

P.S., http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt says
   The only way to keep a URL out of Google's index is to let Google
   crawl the page and see a meta tag specifying robots="noindex".
   Although this meta tag is already present on the edit page HTML
   template, Google does not spider the edit pages (because they are
   forbidden by robots.txt) and therefore does not see the meta tag.

But that paragraph need not hinder fixing this bug.
Comment 1 Antoine "hashar" Musso (WMF) 2007-05-20 16:20:56 UTC
Confirmed for mozilla.org wiki:
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwiki.mozilla.org%2FSpecial%3ARandom
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2007-05-20 17:21:00 UTC
Why don't you just prohibit Special:Random in your robots.txt?
Comment 3 Dan Jacobson 2007-05-30 03:35:05 UTC
>Why don't you just prohibit Special:Random in your robots.txt?
Good temporary workaround, but:
* One must learn about, create, and not screw up a robots.txt, that
will get lost anyway perhaps before long as it is not in the tar file.
* Even a Mr. WikiSysop doesn't necessarily control robots.txt (e.g., *.wikia.com)
But mainly:
* Each WikiSysop must manually fix a problem that upstream could fix with a
mere nofollow in the link.
Comment 4 Rob Church 2007-08-29 01:07:43 UTC
rel="nofollow" does not mean, "don't follow this link"; rather, it means, "don't assign this page weight in ranking or related algorithms based on significance".
Comment 5 Dan Jacobson 2007-08-29 22:08:22 UTC
Anyway now I am using http://taizhongbus.jidanni.org/robots.txt where I do things like
Disallow: /index.php?title=Special:
Disallow: /index.php?diff=
Disallow: /index.php?oldid=
Disallow: /index.php?title=Template:
Disallow: /skins
Disallow: /*&
#the above is a Google, etc. extension

And then I externally link
http://taizhongbus.jidanni.org/index.php?title=Template_talk:Robots_temp
for search engines, which just transcludes Special:Allpages
as a hack to get around bug 8473 .

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