Stratadrake
Dragon Writer
Since: Oct, 2009
#2: Oct 6th 2013 at 8:34:20 PM
Yeah. It's amazing how many nonexistent pages actually turn up in the search engines (and in practically every namespace, too) because the wiki is not telling them the page DOESN'T EXIST.
An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.
KarjamP
The imaginative Christian Asperger
from South Africa
Since: Apr, 2011
Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
MrL1193
Since: Apr, 2013
__Vano
Since: Dec, 2014
#8: Aug 23rd 2015 at 9:51:31 AM
NOINDEX is fine for me. 404 is not appropriate for nonexistent wiki pages however (let alone when there previously was a wiki page or when the page is serving as an auto-disambiguation); it's strictly only for broken URLs.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
eroock
Since: Sep, 2012
eroock
Since: Sep, 2012
Total posts: 13

Searching for tropes using the search box is a terrible experience, since you have to sift through a bunch of empty pages that have been moved elsewhere. Please either have them return a 404 code instead of 200, or add the NOINDEX meta tag to empty pages so they stop appearing in search results.