Mediawiki SEO - Get 400% growth in SERPs and traffic
Mediawiki SEO for better search engine rankings and traffic.
- Introduction
- Basic Mediawiki SEO
- URLs
- Directory
- WWW and non-WWW
- Meta
- Description
- Keywords
- Duplicate content issue
- Images
- Sitemap
- Skin
- Skin selection and customization
- Speed optimization
- Sidebar
- Spam
- Off site SEO
- Measurements
Introduction
It can also be seen that successful websites with Mediawiki (other that Wikimedia sites) like Wiki-travel and WikiHow have made lots of customization to Mediawiki. One of the major disadvantage with that approach is the maintenance. Wikitravel and WikiHow still relies on older versions of Mediawiki as upgrading and customizing it again to meet their standards are not going to be an easy task.
This article focuses on best practices and approaches without making any changes to the Mediawiki core. This ensures that future upgrades and maintenance are easy to apply and it will enjoy good( not best) search engine rankings.
Basic Mediawiki SEO
URLs
Short/Pretty URLs are necessary This makes URLs easy to read, easy to remember, easy to type and are thus loved by search engines.
- Avoid
site.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page - Avoid
site.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page - Good site.com/wiki/Main_Page
- Better site.com/wiki/Main-Page
- Best site.com/wiki/main-page
Achieving site.com/wiki/Main_Page is comparatively easy and can be done in two methods:
- Method 1: Server side configuration, which requires root access. If you are on shared hosting, you probably don't have root access.
- Method 2: htaccess method. Can be done on shared hosting too. But will slow down the wiki performance as reading htaccess is required every time someone access a page.
Search engines usually demands hyphens to separate words rather than underscores.
- Hyphens consumes the same amount width as a space does and thus normal people with general reading habits will find it pleasing to their eyes.
- However, people with programming language background are more comfortable with underscores for obvious reasons and thus they love to see underscores.
So, if you are targeting technical people with programming backgrounds and does not care about SEO, use under scores. If you are targeting general people and demands good search engines rankings, hyphens are the way to go. Mediawiki, by default, converts all spaces to underscores and requires core level modifications to change the same.
Search engines prefer all small letters URL and I personally feel that is much more easy to type and read. However, there is an on going debate between Mediawiki webmasters, where some of them prefer CamelCase and Title Case while some prefer all lower case.
The general thumb of rule is not distract users and make it easy to read and type and thus search engine friendly.
Directory
It's always recommended to install Mediawiki in a directory, like w or wiki. Never install on the root www directory as it is not even recommended by Mediwiki.
WWW and non-WWW
http://www.site.com and http://site.com are entirely different. You should decided which one has to be used for your website and stick on to the same. you should also redirect the other ones automatically to the preferred domain. On Google webmaster tools, add both domains and set the preferred domain in the settings to be on the safe side.
Meta
DescriptionMeta description tags makes the pages more search engine friendly. It also becomes useful while sharing the pages on social networking sites. Use Description2 to autmatically add meta description tags to Mediawiki.
Keywords
Meta keywords are are still considered as a good seo practice. Use AutoKeywords extension to automatically add meta keywords to Mediawiki pages.
Duplicate content issue
Mediawiki suffers from duplicate content issues. Use CanonURL extension to automatically add canonical URLs to web pages. This solves duplicate content issues up to some extent.Images
In Mediawiki, HTML page is served when a picture file is accessed. For example: http://secpedia.net/wiki/File:Nullcon_logo.jpg. When search engines crawls theses pages it finds picture file extensions with unexpected content and thus avoids indexing them. There are workarounds, but requires making changes to core and is not recommended.Sitemaps
Mediawiki has in built mechanism for generating sitemaps. However they are not enabled by default. Follow these guides and enable sitemaps in Mediawiki for better SEO. One of the another problem associated with sitemaps are they usually get placed in /w directory and web site administrator usually blocks search engines from accessing this directory using robots.txt file. There are two workarounds:- Make sure that generated sitemaps are automatically placed where search engines have access.
- Make exception rules in robots.txt to grant access to all the sitemap files.
Skin
Skin selection and customizationDon't use stock Mediawiki skin. That makes it look like another Wikimedia site. Use colors, fonts and styles suitable for your contents and audience. Vector skin is a good starting point to begin with.
Speed optimization
Everyone loves web pages that loads faster. Do not add lots of scripts and additional gimmicks which can slow down your website. Pages with minimum loading time means, people spends less time waiting and more time reading your content.
Sidebar
Sidebar comes as default in Mediawiki installations and is a good place to put important links. Remove any unwanted links from there and make it neat and relevant to the wiki.
