What makes a good CMS from an SEO Perspective

public

yaph@drupal.org - Wed, 2008-01-30 21:42

A good roundup of what an SEO friendly CMS should offer by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Most of the needs are met by Drupal core and the rest can be done with contrib modules. Two questions come to my mind:

Do you think customizable meta tags and redirects should be features of Drupal core?
Should the fact that Drupal is a very SEO friendly system out of the box play a bigger role in marketing Drupal?

Better SEO was one of the reasons why I switched from Joomla to Drupal some time ago and I guess it's a factor for many people.

Sitewide tags: Marketing · search engine optimization

» Login or register to post comments

Regarding your questions: -

monchito - Thu, 2008-02-28 09:42

Regarding your questions:
- yes
- definately yes! but I would not say that drupal is a very seo friendly system, because it still misses some basic things, like alternate title-tags, keyword rich urls and mostly, a LOT of duplicate content

Drupal

J. Cohen - Thu, 2008-02-28 10:41

Drupal doesn't have a lot of duplicate content unless you are using certain modules.

The title elements, keyword-rich URLs, etc., can be taken care of with modules...

yes, there is ofcourse a

monchito - Thu, 2008-02-28 10:58

yes, there is ofcourse a difference between modules and the core.

I would really love to see a nofollow module which makes it possible to add rel="nofollow" to specific internal links, for instance to the /user/password and /user/register pages, comment urls, etc.

There are some aspects where

yaph@drupal.org - Tue, 2008-03-04 19:23

There are some aspects where Drupal can improve regarding SEO. But Drupal does offer keyword rich URLs through the core path module.

To avoid duplicate content issues, you can restrict paths in the robots.txt, e.g. disallow URLs where content is aggregated. The default robots.txt includes the following lines:

Disallow: /user/register/
Disallow: /user/password/
Disallow: /user/login/

This should be enough for telling robots that care about this file to not follow these URLs. Actually, this is probably the only way to tell them not to follow URLs. The nofollow attribute doesn't not necessarily mean that robots do not spider the linked pages, but that these links are not being considered in ranking algorithms.

--
Websites: SEO-Expert-Blog.com | Torlaune.de

robots.txt errors

J. Cohen - Wed, 2008-03-05 08:49

Those three robots.txt rules are actually some of the ones that don't work in Drupal:

Disallow: /user/register/
Disallow: /user/password/
Disallow: /user/login/

More about that issue here.

You are correct. The

yaph@drupal.org - Wed, 2008-03-05 14:15

You are correct. The trailing slashes need to be removed from these and other rules as outlined in the article you linked to.