How well is Drupal calendar content recognized by search engines?

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Brainwrap's picture

I have a client who's been using an ancient (by web standards) Perl-based calendar script program (called, dully enough, "CalendarScript", which hasn't been updated in years.

I've recently converted other parts of her site over to Drupal 6.x, and have been strongly recommending moving off of this old calendar script out of both security concerns and usability reasons. However, she's used it for many years and is reluctant to abandon it.

The single biggest concern she has actually has nothing to do with the functionality or security of Drupal; it's about whether/how well search engines will recognize the content from the dozen-plus calendars filled with content that she has. The current Perl-based calendar content is picked up reasonably well by Google/Bing/Yahoo; she's worried that making the switch will negatively impact how well the content is recognized by them.

Could any provide any information about whether this is any cause for concern?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

We talked about this last

Michael Hofmockel's picture

We talked about this last night at our monthly meeting while covering SEO in general. The speaker talked about a personal incident where bots where chasing the "next" month links out into eternity. That was causing load problems on his server.

I think her concerns are unsubstantiated. This is likely the heart of her site/business and is afraid to move on. Much hand holding is required. Help her understand that you are not killing her baby.

I feel confident in switching to Drupal as long as you have all the proper SEO stuff in place. Maybe add some logic in your robots.txt file to not follow links in the calendar section to deeply.

Regards,
Michael Hofmockel

Open Source || Open Access || Open Mind

Thanks for the feedback...

Brainwrap's picture

I actually did some general Googling on the topic (although it was related more to SEO in relation to PHP-generated content in general, not Drupal/Calendar pages specifically).

The gist of it was that Drupal-generated calendar files should be *better* recognized by search engines due to the search-friendly URLs. For example, here's a typical example of her CURRENT site calendar:

http://(domain)/cgi-bin/calendar.pl?calendar=myclient&view=Event&event_id=94

As opposed to:

http://(domain)/event/some_category/11/08/31

I think I've won her over, but your points should help some more. Thanks again!

I'm sold just on the URL path

Michael Hofmockel's picture

I'm sold just on the URL path alone! Google notoriously ignores url parameters.

Also, what makes her think she has good SEO now. Maybe she just has great content and a good following. Content is King!

Regards,
Michael Hofmockel

Open Source || Open Access || Open Mind