Search Engine Traffic

MediaWiki site out of box can be easily configured to have search engine friendly URLs. The main MediaWiki site has detailed instructions to do so. However, search engine friendly URL for your wiki site is not nearly enough. For example, you can have on your hand a lot of ’supplemental index’ page because Google does not like a lot of dynamically generated wiki pages. Here are some simple steps you can immediately implement to avoid duplicate content penalty and ’supplemental index’ page for your MediaWiki site.

Use Robots.txt to Block Special Wiki Pages

For a starter, you don’t want to Google index your the special random page or the special search page. If your wiki install files are in a directory different from ‘wiki’, for example, they are in ‘wk’. You want to prevent search engine from indexing all pages under subdirectory ‘wk’. You could use the following in your robots.txt file to achieve these objectives.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wk/
Disallow: /wiki/Special:Random
Disallow: /wiki/Special%3ARandom
Disallow: /wiki/Special:Search
Disallow: /wiki/Special%3ASearch

Internal Linking Structure

When you first start your wiki site, you probably don’t have a lot of external links into your individual wiki page (deep link), so you want to make sure you have a linking structure that allows both human and search engine to easily navigate to all your pages. Once you have a decent PageRank for your wiki home page. The PageRank can be spread to internal pages to keep them out of supplemental index.

Get External Links to Your MediaWiki Pages

Deep linking refers to linking to individual pages on your wiki site from external web sites. It is widely known that deep links boost PageRank and helps to keep your page out of supplemental index.
An often used method of getting deep links is using article marketing techniques. You write quality articles that are related to the content of the page you are linking to and submit the articles to various article directory. Popular article directories can even help you get additional site visitors.

You may also want to check out our posts installing mediawiki a quick guide,

Share This