Search Engine Optimization

Hope you find these tips useful. They had very good impact on my sites.
I had a site with lot of taxonomies created "on the fly". This was very useful to get good rankings for very specific and rare keywords, that in sum were providing an important volume of traffic. I consider this the first tip, although no new news: the major key good point in Drupal SEO are taxonomies: they are the gate to lots of very specific keywords. I consider this the best starting point to go after more appealing ones.
The problem with this approach is that although submitting sitemaps to google and all that stuff, many of those taxonomy pages were not being indexed by Google, and many of this "mini keywords" results were lost (I suppose Google could consider the content very similar between some of them).
Here goes the second tip: using the taxonomy introduction module, I was able to add a brief introduction, different for every term. This simple action resulted in much more taxonomy pages getting indexed, and lot of visits coming from many more of those very specific keywords.

Hello
Just to share something that happened to my cuentos site some weeks ago. I was configuring metatags to include geourl info (previously was it was only including description, abstract and keywords fields). When I checked the geourl field to be included, then automatically DC.title tag was added to my all pages (although I didn't notice until some time ago).
The problem was that this was considered by Google as a duplicated tittle issue, and my pages were so heavily penalized that it was almost impossible to find my site in Google, even for keyworks that were very, very closely related to my site, that previously were #1 or #2. It took me about a week to discover what had happened to my site's rankings (webmaster tools was very helpful with this, although it took some time to report the "duplicate title" cue). Once I removed geourl field, DC.tittle disappeared and good rankings returned after another week. At least, I learned something very valuable, don' do that ever again!

Has anyone of you experience those kind of problems with DC.tittle tags? is it supposed Google to consider them as a duplicated title tag, and penalize them?

If using the Path Module (which is standard for SEO), the URLs become case insensitive even on *nix servers. That means you can get duplicate content if people accidentally link to versions of your URLs with different cases.

Example:

• drupal.org/handbook
• drupal.org/hAnDbOoK

Just something to watch out for until it's fixed.

I added an issue here:
http://drupal.org/node/276201

Hi,

I just checked google webmaster tools and i found that i have 4 pages duplicated from categories (taxonomy) one of them is:

/taxonomy/term/10 that its duplicated of ‎/taxonomy/term/10/0

Is the correct method to disallow all of those duplicate categories with:

Disallow /taxonomy/term/*/0

I would like to just remove all the /taxonomy/term/*/0 in all categories, for example:

/taxonomy/term/1/0
/taxonomy/term/2/0
/taxonomy/term/3/0
...

Thanks.

I've been doing quite a lot of seo tweaking to various Drupal sites over the past few years. I've run into an issue that I would like to throw out for discussion. On the one hand, taxonomy is great for categorizing your site, getting crawled and helping engines understand your clusters of content. On the other hand, all of those taxonomy links in posts are internal site "votes" for taxonomy listing pages which might or might not be the key search engine target pages for those concepts.

Hi! I'm new to Drupal, but am trying out the tips I see in this group. They've been very helpful.

I recently just moved my old site, www.amici.com.ph to Drupal. I still have to learn how to do themes soon. The old links that were indexed by google, I used htaccess to redirect to relevant pages of the new website. Since the old links redirect to new pages, won't they be treated as pages with duplicate content?

Thanks!

William

This Drupal SEO tutorial was written about 1 1/2 years ago and was getting badly outdated, so I updated it.

I'll organize it better when I have time, but at least wanted to have it be current.

In a nutshell:

Today I discovered something disturbing: a bunch of pages of my Drupal 5 cruise guide site were missing from Google's index under the site name, and showed up under the IP address instead. Worse yet, Google has been known to penalize sites for duplicating content on a large scale - a real risk if it's seeing both the URL and the IP address. I did some digging, and I think I found a solution worth sharing.

Generally speaking I find that SEO articles are light on details and heavy on the same old simple ideas, so I was quite happily surprised by Newspaper SEO by Joost de Valk.

Of course, all of these things are easy to achieve with Drupal (if not already standard) :)

Some interesting tips:

<

blockquote>Make sure the article title is in the tag too, and include the category. - - works best in my experience.
...

I work on a cruise information site built in Drupal 5. In addition to a handy guide explaining the essentials of a 1st cruise, we lets users browse and share cruise ship pictures and cruise stories. We've given some thought to SEO, so I thought I'd share a few things we've learned....

How to SEO Drupal.org:

1. Better keyword selection. Phrases like "Community Plumbing" are cute/fun/interesting but do little to actually move our cause forward. We should change the title tag to: "Drupal Content Management System, an Open Source CMS"
2. There isn't an H1 tag. There should be an H1 tag (styled to match the theme) just beneath/near the logo that matches the Title Tag.

Need an SEO Consultant to help my drupal based website. Have a a couple hundred dollars to spend initially, most likely on an hourly basis. More money to spend depending on your help/success.

Collegehoopsnet.com is a popular college basketball site, that uses Drupal in part. Drupal is housed in the /new/ directory while the frontpage and other sections are static html pages or another system (like vbulletin).

Since moving large sections of the site to drupal, overall search engine ranking has been hurt (especially on Google.)

Hi,

I am using Drupal 5.2, Cleanurls, Pathauto and Global Redirect enabled.
Drupal is throwing correct 404 in most cases, BUT
Drupal doesnt throw 404 for all urls with the following pattern:
http://example.com/myContentType/doesnotexist

You can see this Issue live:
http://drupal.org/forum/doesnotexist

Maybe this could be exploited by someone and hurt your SE rankings.
Has anyone a workaround for this? Or don't you see this as an issue?

Hi,

I have been checking Google Webmaster Tools and i got 32 Duplicate meta descriptions:

All the /node?page=* pages.

How do i add custom titles for those pagination pages?

Thanks.

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:

Hello,

We are looking for speakers for the upcoming DrupalCon in Boston. Since you are subscribed to a business and marketing related group, you might be especially interested in the "Business and Marketing" track (see http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/business-and-marketing-track-description... ).

This track covers the following topics:

• The Drupal ecosystem
• Businesses learning to use Drupal
• Case studies
• Showcases: NPO, Education, News, Media, Government, Healthcare

I think something that is badly needed for drupal SEO is a way to add nofollow tags selectively to a menu link.

The noindex idea is good but it doesn't really solve the intended problem. Even if a page is set to noindex and there is a link to it (which of course there is) link juice will be sent it's way. So in a way its actually worse. Your sending link juice to a page and then telling the SE's not to index it. Essentially sending your link juice to oblivian.

I noticed that a few variables of Drupal could cause a few bots take it as duplicate content. For example: domain.ext/?randomtext.

I checked google today and i got indexed domain.ext?text in google and its flagged as duplicate content.

I added this to robots.txt:

Disallow:/?text

Do you think its enough to be removed from google results?

Thanks.

HI,

I am looking for a SEO specialist for my new Drupal site. I have built the shell and the main content pages.

I need help with:

• suggestions for good domain names based on my targeted market,

• SEO healthcheck (navigation scheme / contents keywords / SEO related modules / other).

Please contact me through my Drupal.org profile with a couple of references, your availabilities and costs.

Kind regards,
Marc.

I am pleased to announce the release of the Drupal "SEO" Checklist Module.

The "SEO" Checklist Module provides a list of good Search Engine Optimization actions that you should take to maximize the presence of your website in the major search engines. It provides little functionality itself but rather it helps you keep track of what needs to be done.

**Benefits:

Hallo
this is my first post, I hope I do it properly.

I'm tring to optimize drupal for seo. I'm using clean urls with pathauto and semplified urls. To avoid duplicated content between clean urls and nodes I've disabled the spiders to visit the nodes pages by editing the robots.txt file
with
Disallow: /agenzietui/node$

Now the problem is that the sitemap module is generating a sitemap which includes all the nodes pages and not the semplified urls pages.

If you and have the transliteration on with pathauto so that when it creates paths to content it replaces foreign characters like ä and ö with a and o. But you can also have it translate ä to ae and ö to oe. What does google prefer?

My only theory is that is that it's more likely that it interprets (or porhaps will in the future) ae as ä, but it can't interpret a as ä. Or will the extra letters that ae versus just a screw it up even more, seo wise..?

What's are your recommendations/experiences?

Hi Guys,

I've just finished a basic AB Split Testing module for Drupal 5 that allows you to select 2 themes and offer them to alternating visitors. It tracks whether they reach a supplied action page (such as a thankyou page after a sale) and then lets you know the conversion rate for each theme.

You can download it from:

http://webzen.com.au/drupal-split-testing

I've applied for CVS access to get this into the module directory. Any suggestions, bugs etc are welcome.

>Here is a step by step video tutorial on how to use create search friendly content that is picked up by search engines with little effort for Drupal SEO. In this demo I am using Drupal 5.2 with friendly URLs turned on and the meta tag module. Path auto is another module to consider, however if you want more control I recommend sticking to the meta tag module, that allows you to set index nofollow tags sitewide or for each content.

Ebay style, table search results with CKK fieds and listing thumbnail

I am working on a classified ad site,

I built a custom content-type called advert.

I have managed to build the listing views using views, image field and image cache

I want a custom search box with tabbed options to either search the advert-node-type only or the rest of the site. So it will look like this:

|search| (adverts)(help)

the two tabs will be adverts and help

searching with the adverts tab selected will render only advert-node-type content

I just recently learned about the meta robots noindex tag and realized that it could be useful in removing some of the lower quality pages in a site from the index. For example, user/ user/register user/password are all pages which frequently get indexed early and stay in the index, but which are not really useful parts of the SERPS.

I'm sure that you all can think of other pages which you would like to exclude.

My proposal for the module is pretty simple:

The default robots.txt file in Drupal 5.* has some problems. Also, the more modules one adds, the more duplicate content and low-quality URLs are created.

What robots.txt issues have people come across? Here are a few of my common modifications:

Greetings! I would like to announce that SpryDev today launched the Drupal SEO Podcast at http://www.sprydev.com/podcast. Over the coming months we'll be exploring all aspects of SEO on Drupal. I wanted to start out with the basics so the first podcast is rather short and covers the Page Title module. I know that's pretty basic stuff for this crowd but we wanted to get the ball rolling and it seemed a good place to start. If you have any suggestions for future topics, please let me know.

http://drupal.org/node/147143 demands your review. Code freeze has happened, but i'm still tempted to get this in, and hopefully it will. The patch is nothing that's stuck anywhere. That is, we should be ready for the RTBC state, as soon as there are a few more detailed reviews. Even usability reviews are welcomed!

Details about changes

• Active/Preferred(Redirect to) alias per system path. So that all your aliases can redirect to the preferred one.
• Search Engine Optimization! Google hates multiple urls with same content, this one of course is a ++ to SEO in Drupal.
• A whole new intuitive path alias editing interface. Easy to grasp at first glance!
• Total multi-language support for aliases. Language tabs appears, whenever you are editing an alias. A screen shot says it all: http://drupal.org/files/issues/URL aliases | Drupal_1181082809921.png
• Fixes several glitches in path module/system.

Screen shot

I wrote the following article on improving search results bymoving from an html site to a drupal site a little while ago and wanted to know if others have had similar conversations with clients. Basically it seems that there are a lot of folks who will toss money at techies who have a plan to increase their search engine rankings.

The module page_lang which I have build for this Spanish school in spain is an attempt to adapt pages to searches from concrete countries. The proyect en drupal site is http://drupal.org/project/page_lang

Hi,
I'm using the Pathauto module to define the path of nodes.
From a SEO point of view, would you recommend the use of hierarchical alias?

As an example consider the pattern for the posts of my site www.clipperz.com.

users/[user]/blog/

Every time I publish a new post

http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/2007/05/18/clipperz_compact_in_...

several index aliases are generated

http://www.clipperz.com/users/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/

I have recently seen a number of references in the detailed logs of "Referrer http://www.google.com/" -- what's going on here?

I'd like to draw your attention to two significant (and possibly related) search module bugs that are leading to widespread corruption of our search indexes:

Missing nodes in search index:
http://drupal.org/node/139537

The problem is missing content. You can't find a node with the search index if it doesn't get indexed for some reason.

Duplicate entries:
http://drupal.org/node/143160

The problem is duplicated entries in the search index which bloats the index and makes potential upcoming query optimizations impossible.

Hi Friends,

I am new to drupal. I am very much intrested in SEO. Please help me to develope in SEO.

Thanks.

Regards,
Kannan C.

When starting with Drupal recently, I was a bit startled to see that - in Garland and Aberdeen themes - there were H1 tags around site title. Removed these, easily enough.

But - I'd like to use H1 for main page title, which is surely the intended purpose, and important for SEO - Google, say, figuring that the words in H1 tags are key to describing what a page is about.

I think easy enough to do for node titles. But then, might find that get several h1 tags if have a list of node titles on a page.

The great Yahoo DrupalCon, formerly know as OSCMS, was my first visit to the Mecca of Search (Sunnyvale/Mountain View) and the experience was just made complete a few days ago. A friend of mine asked me to accompany him to a meeting at the Microsoft offices in Mountain View. He was presenting one of his inventions to some Microsoft bigwigs and wanted me to come along as a technical consult. It sounded interesting...

Hi,

I have a quick SEO question I couldn't find any information about.

The paging in Drupal of, say, the frontpage, results to URLS like "node?page=1", even with CleanURL enabled. With Global Redirect this is even shorter, with something like "/?page=1".

I have a feeling this could be optimized to "/page/1", but I wasn't able to find any reference to this subject anywhere (though I might be missing something).

I'd be happy to hear from you on this issue, and if it is indeed SEO relevant - how to implement it.

Fili

At drupalcon I had some discussions with chad jones about adding a rel=nofollow attribute to certain links in Drupal. Specifically we discussed pages like the user login page, the feed links, and other similar links which are on most every page of every drupal site but which are not "important" pages where you want to send your "link juice".

We talked about several possible solutions to this. I brought up that it could be done at the theme level or in a module on a per site basis. Chad seemed to prefer the idea of having it in core.

I see this has already been covered a bit, but I wanted to share my own approach to dealing with Drupal's duplicate content issues. I've written a new article called How Duplicate Content Hurts Drupal Sites. In this article I outline how to use .htaccess and robots.txt to redirect and hide duplicate content from search engines, and discuss a few related modules.

Hi friends,

I am new to Drupal. I just like to know what are the basic steps to be followed in Drupal to create a search engine friendly website. Hope will hear from all of you.

I have already had a review on
http://www.smorgasbord.net/how_to_optimize_drupal_web_site_for_google_ya... - This was very helpful. Anyhow I want to learn more.

I've been reading a lot of threads about the importance of the "Category" module (http://drupal.org/project/category) for search engine optimization (SEO).

As I understand it, the Category module enables a webmaster to control the (1) body text, (2) meta description, and (3) page title included on category/index pages (pages which are otherwise NOT nodes). Because category/index pages are the most likely (other than the home page) to be ranked high by Google, this enables you to tweak these three elements for superior search engine placement.

I wanted to raise the flag on a potential SEO problem with Drupal 4.7.5 and Drupal 5.0 with regards to 404 Page not found.

The issue has been discussed in detail and several patches have been put on the table. Here's where you can have your say and get involved in the action:

http://drupal.org/node/90780

I'm wondering if there would be a way to create a module that would do 301 redirects from static pages to Drupal pages.

That is, if I have a site constructed of old html pages, and I upgrade the client to Drupal, I am in theory faced with having to cut and paste the content from the old page into a node form of some sort. This is fine.

However, in order for the page rank of this old html page to be maintained, I need to point SEs to the new node rather than the old page.

Would it be possible to do this with a module?

Relating to this: http://drupal.org/node/16084

Here's my first pass at a 'checklist' for Drupal & SEO. I know some or all of this has been covered elsewhere, but I'd like to see a simple list. If a good one exists elsewhere, please provide a URL and we can just point to that.

For instance, what modules and configuration are 'must have' for SEO purposes? (I'll add links as time permits)

Currently, when you use a URL path alias to an existing node, and later decide to change the URL alias, the old path 'breaks' - so, if you have an older page that has inbound links from, say, Google search or some web directory, people will get a 404 error - not good for SEO or building traffic, in my experience.

Hey folks,

just joined here and know quite a bit about SEO already, implementing Drupal sine 4.6

One of my major issues & concerns still is, that altough we have path_alias and path_auto to create nice paths for us,
they are only aliases for the original nodes...

This means the aliases are STILL accessible, so we get multiple urls like these two in a simple node alias

site.com/my-nice-path
site.com/node/4711

effective today one could start to rank for both pages, as the "old" node path is not redirected properly (with a 301) to the alias. This could also mean that the "good" path (which does convert better, is better memorized ) could be burried in the SERPs

See here:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Yahoo_and_Microsoft_rally_behind_sitema...

There is now a very compelling reason to polish (and use) the sitemaps module that we had developed in 2005 as a Summer of Code project.

I am a web architect and a system analyst. Now, I've translated Drupal To Hebrew and initiated the creation of a drupal community in Israel. Following Gábor Hojtsy's request, Here is a use-case analysis of my expernece from the Hebrew Translation of Drupal, and with it's implementation on tens of sites, with indexation for search engine relevancy.

Recently, I've tried the Internationalization module on two of my sites, but gave it up and decided to wait for a later time. Problem is that i18n is not yet compatible with many other modules. I am a heavy user of taxonomy / category modules. The i18n module is a big step forward, but more work is needed. I need language specific taxonomy with menu integration. On one site, I have tried to use the taxonomy module, but found that the vocabulary names are not translated (nither in the node entery screens nor in the menu). On the other site, I tried to use the new category module but discovered that the node input form (and the menu) displayed all categories without language distinction.

First - I want to ask why we can't turn on subscriptions here on groups.drupal? We apparently have taxonomy_breadcrumb and a few other "non-core" modules working. We have 64 subscribers, and nobody knows when posts are updated here without coming back each day (which I get few of the 64 do). I think with subscriptions on we'd get a lot more participation.

Ok, enough of that. I would like to know who here is interested in participating in the mock creation of a drupal web site optimized for SEO. What I mean is - let's collectively write a cohesive plan for setting up the most optimized site possible.