Re: No-indexing of project-space pages

>
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain@...>
> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)
> > <newyorkbrad@...> wrote:
> > > A couple of months ago, I raised on this list the issue of
> "no-indexing"
> > > Wikipedia pages outside the mainspace, principally including
> > project-space
> > > pages such as XfDs, AN/ANI, RfA's, RfAr's, and the like, but possibly
> > > including userspace as well.  By no-indexing, I refer to coding these
> > pages
> > > such that they will not be picked up by Google or other search engines.
> >
> > Note that much of this is already done, see our robots file:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt
> >
> > Currently all AFD, RFA, RFC and RFAR subpages (but not the main AFD
> > page, the main RFA page etc) are blocked from indexing. Of your
> > examples the admin noticeboard and userspace are probably the big
> > examples of pages that are still indexed that we might not want to be
> > so.
> >
>
> Just to pick everyone's favorite topic as an example:
>
>
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&pwst=1&q=+site:en.wikipedia.org+%22Articles+for+deletion%22+Brandt+wikipedia
>
> What is the benefit to allowing Google to index DRV, talk pages, and
> user/user talk pages? Aside from the Mediawiki native search function not
> being always that great, the only negative to blocking or restricting
> Search
> Engines to just cover strictly Article space would be a possible loss of
> Google Juice, which should not a concern.
>
> - Joe