Block certain namespace webpages for anonymous users (non registered users)

drywall_dan

For each general audience webpage (i.e. any main-namespace page such as an article page or Category: page), the MediaWiki content management system creates about 10 or 100 or 1,000 if not more webpages (link pages, revision pages, revision-diff pages, etc.) and for me that's a serious SEO problem. MediaWiki doesn't have any core or even noncore fast way to lock all these peripheral webpages (for lack of a better term) to registered users, so...

Originally asked by sosoalter on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Thinking out loud.... would something like this work? Recreate your general audience pages by turning them into specific landing pages that interlink between each other (limiting overflow). Then block your subscriber content by programming a token requirement. Subscriber logs in, user ID verified, password matches, token authenticated. Subscriber moves about the subscriber portal using the random token it was assigned. Web crawlers cannot imitate the token process, so they gain no access to the subscriber portal. Tokens expire after xx minutes of inactivity.

Full answer by elbrant: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/141518 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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