https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36581

--- Comment #2 from Edward Chernenko <[email protected]> 2012-05-17 07:47:15 
UTC ---
I'd say that every wiki except Wikipedia should care.
Most encyclopedias get >60% of visitors from search engines.

<h1> tag is always used by a search engine to determine a topic, most important
keywords, thematic category.  

Knowing that, there are two reasons why the garbage inside <h1> is bad:

1) it was never expected that <h1> would contain anything but pure text (every
book in HTML and SEO says that), therefore a search engine might not (I stress
MIGHT) parse its contents to the end. That means "span", "auto" etc. may be
recognized as the high-priority keywords for the page. That means sacrificing
the actual keywords.

2) some search engines do not like garbage in H1-H6 tags; they treat it as a
malformed HTML code or even as an attempt to deceive a search engine, and the
positioning of pages containing this may be penalized.

This problem is not just about <h1> and those spans. HTML generated by
MediaWiki contains tonn of things (like <meta name="generator" etc.) which are
extremely not recommended by any SEO guidebook.

Personally I had to divise a filter for my wiki which erases all these tags.
However I believe it would be great to have a
"$wgTurnOffAllTheseUnneededHTMLGarbage" variable in MediaWiki config which
would spare the same work for others.

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