SEO Tips for Newspaper Websites

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greggles's picture

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:

Make sure the article title is in the tag too, and include the category. - - works best in my experience.
...
I understand that people want to track how many visitors came from their RSS feed, but there are better ways to do this than using ?source=rss in your links and not redirecting them out... Another case of duplicate content I often encounter is when articles are placed in multiple categories, and have a URL in each category. You should pick one category as the main one, and redirect all the other entry points to that main URL.
...

Etc.

Great stuff!

Comments

Thanks!

itangalo's picture

Great tip. Thanks!

//Johan Falk, Sweden

err

niklp's picture

How does this affect taxonomy pages then?? If I have the same article in more than one category, the teaser is applied in both cases, but not the full node - what's the deal here?

Web Development in Nottingham, UK by Kineta Systems

taxonomy

Z2222's picture

Not sure exactly what he is saying in the article, but I think what he meant is watch out for the same article having multiple different URLs depending on what category page you get to the content from.

E.g., one article with the following URLs depending on which category page you find the teaser on:

example.com/cars/the-page
example.com/world-news/the-page
example.com/marketplace/the-page

If that is what they mean, it's not normally a problem in Drupal.

Google News Indexing

jgeorgerorg's picture

My pages have been optimized with title tags, categories, etc...

But my news archives are still unable to find ANY visibility in Google News. Have any of you experienced archiving issues with the search engine news results?

Numbers in URL

geoffb's picture

I believe that Google News requires some unique numbers in the URL before it will pick it up.

To make this work for us, we have added the NodeID into the autopath of each of our articles.

Hope that helps.

  • Geoff

Google News

Z2222's picture

Did you apply to get listed? Google News doesn't automatically include sites.
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/

No News Sitemap

geoffb's picture

I can't remember if we applied anywhere - perhaps here: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py

I thought we had a News Sitemap, but I guess we never got around to that.

What I can remember is that when we switched over to Drupal, news alerts for our site stopped and didn't start back up again until we addedthe numbers.

I'm pretty sure we didn't do anything special for our old home-grown CMS either and we still got crawled by Google News. Our old CMS used id numbers in the URLs by default.

Similar Issues..

jgeorgerorg's picture

Thanks Geoffb. I previously used a custom cms that archived all news posts with a wordpress-esq' url structure, using month/day/post. Since the flip to Drupal, I have lost all love from Google News. I have a fairly clean category structure, all fit with RSS feeds.
I will try and submit once again according to the google publisher guidelines and change up the url structure to include a 3 digit number.
Does my sitemap look up to par with yours? http://www.aspendailynews.com/sitemap -- can you give me an example to work off?

Thanks - jg

sitemap module

Z2222's picture

That sitemap module creates duplicate content if you have URL aliases for your taxonomy terms. Not good for SEO until a bug is fixed.

See this Drupal SEO page.
(this comment)

Sketch...

johsw@drupal.org's picture

I've got a module (almost done), that creates a news-sitemap. Let me know if any of you wanna try it out.

news sitemap for Drupal

Z2222's picture

I'm interested...

Maybe one of you could help

johsw@drupal.org's picture

Maybe one of you could help me through cvs'ing it? And make a real project out of it? I've got an account, but I haven't had the time (or courage) to throw myself into it.

I'm interested in trying the module too

donfink's picture

And, I don't mind helping if you turn it into a project, but I'm worthless as a programmer. I'll help with documentation, testing, and so on.

we would love to try it out!

idealista's picture

we would love to try it out! :)

Local sitemap vs. Google Sitemap

geoffb's picture

jg,

Your sitemap is like the one we have on our site to help users navigate sections and to help crawlers index the site.

But, you may also want to check out Google Webmaster Tools and specifically Google Sitemaps. Have a look at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318

  • geoff

Google News Sitemap

jgeorgerorg's picture

geoff. were able to create a google news sitemap (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=42738) using drupal's xml sitemap module? Im a bit of a noob on that front. Thanks for the help tho.

-jg

XML Sitemap module is cool

Chris Charlton's picture

The XML Sitemap module is really useful and does all the dirty work for you. Totally check it out.

Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant

I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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