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Allow indexing of redirects
Closed, InvalidPublic

Description

For some reason search engines are not showing redirect pages anymore. I'm pretty sure a search such as

or

would return a page whose title is "Fryderyk Szopen", since there is a redirect at

What changed?

A search for 'intitle:"Fryderyk Szopen" site:en.wikipedia.org' returns nothing:

This is bad for articles on wikis (e.g. those in Portuguese) where there are title differences caused by language variants, since both titles are valid but we can have only one page (and we shouldn't privilege one of the variants).


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26115

Details

Reference
bz36174

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to High.Nov 22 2014, 12:19 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz36174.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

(In reply to comment #0)

This is bad for articles on wikis (e.g. those in Portuguese) where there are
title differences caused by language variants, since both titles are valid but
we can have only one page (and we shouldn't privilege one of the variants).

bumping to highest and CCing Robla and Sumanah.

There doesn't appear to be any metadata that prohibits the indexing of redirects. Beyond pinging Google, Yahoo, and others about how they index our content, I'm not sure there's a lot we can do.

mybugs.mail@gmail.com, you wrote: "For some reason search engines are not showing redirect pages anymore." Are you sure something has changed? From when?

Hmm...
The best I can find was this topic from 2011-01-19 (in Portuguese)
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esplanada/propostas/Fim_de_Wikipedia:Pseudo-redirect_%2819jan2011%29
where I described what I believe was the old behavior.

Specifically on
https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=23512390
I mentioned that if someone search for "Adrianna Prieto" (without the quotes, the "site" and the "intitle" parameters, contrary to what I did on comment 0) on Google it would suggest the correct name "Adriana Prieto". This still happens, but not if I search using the parameters:
https://www.google.com.br/search?q=Adrianna+Prieto
https://www.google.com.br/search?q=intitle%3A"Adrianna+Prieto"+site%3Apt.wikipedia.org

On
https://pt.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=23576777
I mentioned that asking Google to 'define:"Dilma Roussef"' (instead of the correct "Dilma Rousseff") as in
https://www.google.com.br/search?q=define:%22Dilma+Roussef%22&defl=all
returns a paragraph whose text is from the real article, but as if the text were from the URL corresponding to the redirect page (as I was expecting on comment 0). Besides, I said that at that time, asking for 'define:"Dilma Rouseff"' would not do the same (but I just checked and it does return the text from the real article as well)

So maybe this is not a MW bug after all, since I was testing using different commands in the two mentioned occasions...

(In reply to comment #2)

There doesn't appear to be any metadata that prohibits the indexing of
redirects. Beyond pinging Google, Yahoo, and others about how they index our
content, I'm not sure there's a lot we can do.

(In reply to comment #3)

So maybe this is not a MW bug after all, since I was testing using different
commands in the two mentioned occasions...

Resolving INVALID