MediaWiki: Why are my image description pages not indexed by Google?
I now host and operate several wikis based on the MediaWiki software. Using the Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) I recently saw that none of my images hosted in those wikis are indexed by Google. To be more precise: The description pages of the images are not indexed. All configuration seemed to be Google-friendly, for instance, a robots.txt existed and was configured correctly, an XML sitemap (including the image description pages) was sent to Googles WMT, no "noindex" or "nofollow" code was in the pages, etc. So, why is Google not indexing my images? During quite some research I found several other people describing in blog posts and discussion forum threads that they had similar problems. It took me quite some while to get a first real clue, though. Note that the URL of the description pages follows the same structure all the time: www.domain.com/wiki/Name.jpg Ok, that's only true if you use URL rewriting to get such "nice" URLs - if you use the bas...