Drupal SEO Tutorial Update

The last time I checked the module it was creating serious errors in the XML file.

Also, I don't think most Web sites need XML sitemaps.

Posts about it:
Google's XML Sitemaps [me]
Verify but don't submit [SEOmoz.com]

XML sitemaps don't help ranking -- they just help with indexing. If you have inbound links and good content organization, search engines will find your content.

I did a test more recently where Google will fetch a page in an XML sitemap even if it doesn't have links. It may be useful on really large sites, but even then I would try to modify the internal linking strategy before spending time on XML sitemaps.

Here is a sample problem with the default robots.txt file:

The links on a typical node say "Login or register to post comments" and the links go to URLs like example.com/user/register?destination=comment/reply/16%2523comment-form

The robots.txt rule Disallow: /user/register/ won't block search engines from following example.com/user/register?destination=comment/reply/16%2523comment-form because there is no slash after register...

There is a longer tutorial about it here.

That HTML sitemap module (http://drupal.org/project/site_map) looks like a good one for SEO because it helps search engines find your pages. I don't think the XML Sitemap Module should be installed though.

There is also the Site Menu module http://drupal.org/project/sitemenu. It generates a site map page with nodes grouped by taxonomy.

Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.

I just made an issue (http://drupal.org/node/256561) for the SEO Checklist module (http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist) to reference the site_map module instead of the XML sitemap, citing this thread.

Nicolas

http://nic.ipwa.net

The domain name is not that important for SEO.

How long ago did you put the site online?
EDIT: The domain name is only 6 days old.

If you click here your home page is indexed:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atopjester.com&num=100

Click that link again in 7 days and you should see a lot more pages listed.

If robots.txt isn't in the root of the domain or subdomain (not the root of the Drupal installation), robots will ignore the file.

For example:

These are okay:
http://example.com/robots.txt
http://subdomain.example.com/robots.txt

These won't work:
http://example.com/drupal/robots.txt
http://subdomain.example.com/drupal/robots.txt

Having a robots.txt file is important for SEO. This page is a good palce to start.

No problem. :)
XML Sitemaps are not needed on the average website. It won't get your new content indexed any faster than the easier RSS/ping method. It's difficult to get XML Sitemaps right and the last time I looked (which was a while ago) the Drupal module wasn't getting it right. Also, Drupal sites can get so complicated (with views, etc.) I don't know if a module can automatically figure that out. It's better to rely on good internal linking structure to get indexed well.

To see if you Drupal theme headers are setup correctly for SEO, try the Firefox X-ray extension, or just ctrl-u to view source and then ctrl-f to search for h1 and h2 elements.