Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

an quick example of this is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

Which gives 

Mozilla Firefox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Firefox)

but the robots meta is
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

Changing summary to reflect the problem and upping severity to normal

Wouldn't this hurt rankings for alternate spellings of the title?

In order to allow alternate spellings to be indexed by search engines, the name
of redirect articles could be mentioned in a meta tag of the target article,
i.e. <meta name="keywords" content="...">.

I don't know whether meta tags are honoured by search engines anymore, though.

I think that maybe, if the User-Agent is that of a major search engine (e.g.
Google), then when requesting a redirect page, instead of the standard redirect,
the bot should recieve an HTTP 301, so that it will consider it to be the same
page as the target - reducing dups in the search results.

(In reply to comment #4)
> In order to allow alternate spellings to be indexed by search engines, the name
> of redirect articles could be mentioned in a meta tag of the target article,
> i.e. <meta name="keywords" content="...">.
> 
> I don't know whether meta tags are honoured by search engines anymore, though.

this is the requirement of
bug 846: feature request: control of meta name="KEYWORDS" content="..."

(In reply to comment #5)
> I think that maybe, if the User-Agent is that of a major search engine (e.g.
> Google), then when requesting a redirect page, instead of the standard redirect,
> the bot should recieve an HTTP 301

I may be wrong about this, but I remember hearing that Google make spot checks
of some kind with a user-agent of something like IE, to penalise sites that send
completely different "optimised" content to the main crawler. 

Restored bug from flood attack.

Closing this WONTFIX; this behavior is deliberate, so titles can be searched on.