Will a Media Wiki guides section affect my sites SEO?

[Fubra]

Hello,

I currently run a Wordpress site that has a large guides section. I've reached the point where a lot of the larget guides need to be split into smaller posts which then link to each other. As we all know, long guides are not always user friendly.

I've taken this oppurtunity to revamp the guides section and I am considering using Media Wiki to turn the Wordpress posts in to a full Wiki Knowledge Base. However this raises some questions for me..

1. Will doing this impact my sites SEO?

2. Does Media Wiki use internal nofollow links?

3. Are there dangers of duplicate content?

4. Do you have any experience using Media Wiki, and what are your thoughts?

I'd appreciate your views on this problem.

Thanks

Joe

[StephanM]

I do, I run a pretty large wiki (2400 articles, over 1000 users) and I can definitely vouch for it. Out of the box it uses canonical tags as well (for redirect pages), knows which pages it should index and which it shouldn't (edit & login pages for instance are noindexed) and Google can handle an out of the box install pretty well.

If needed you can even use one of the meta plugins to optimize your descriptions, titles and noindex/nofollow certain pages or even namespaces. (I wrote the AdvancedMeta plugin, but there's plenty of others).

[KeriMorgret]

Did you decide to use Media Wiki, or to take another path for your knowledge base? Q&A has become a lot more active since you first asked your question, so if you have follow-up questions, you might start a new thread with any further questions you have, and you'll probably see more of a response.

[Fubra]

Great, thanks Kris. I've been reading up since my post and you're right about internal links being dofollow.

Do you have any experience using Media Wiki?

[KrisRoadruck]

you may see some initial drop as google figures out where your content went and how its being repurposed (even with smart 301ing you are still chunking up the content)

HOWEVER, wiki-style internal linking has proven to be very effective! I mean... all those rich anchors, links in the content instead of the nav.. these are all nice signals.

Im fairly certain wiki comes outta the box with dofollow for internal links and nofollow for externals however you can change all of this stuff with settings and plugins.

All in all I'd say if you are willing to commit the time its going to be a net gain both for your rankings (over time) and more importantly for your users.