Posted by sandip choudhury on August 28, 2013 at 1:23pm
Last updated by bryanbraun on Fri, 2013-08-30 19:07
Last updated by bryanbraun on Fri, 2013-08-30 19:07
What's your idea?
We can make Drupal more SEO friendly by converting the URL of drupal.org, like - https://drupal.org/node/53933 to https://drupal.org/drupal-theme-problem. We can implement this by using Pathauto module and transferring all number URL to understandable URL.
It is found that when we search drupal issue in google, some other website are come first than Drupal.org.
What are the benefits?
- We will come to drupal.org for Drupal related problem and not go to other websites.
- Increased participation in Drupal forums
- Increased usage of documentation on Drupal.org (which means more people editing and improving documentation)
What are the risks?
We will have to transfer all number URL to understandable URL. We have to redirect old URL to new URL.
How can we measure the impact of this idea? (metrics)
Search any Drupal problem in Google. The URL which is understandable, it comes first.
Who directly benefits from / will use this improvement? (target audiences)
Drupal user, site builders, problem seekers, administrator.
Are additional resources available for discovery/implementation? (volunteer effort, financial backing, etc.)
Yes, pathauto module is available for implementation. And URL redirect module is also available.
Comments
This would improve more than
This would improve more than just SEO. We use "see: drupal.org/node/313598" in code comments all the time. Instead we could be using drupal.org/issue/ajax-inserts-extra-div. This would be very helpful for users both in Google and when reading URLs to know what the URL pertains to before clicking it.
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Portland Drupal Developer
Hmmm, not sure..
Issue titles can and do change all the time to further clarify things, or to reflect the state of conversation, or to reflect the current workflow of the issue (e.g. "Needs a change notice" or whatever).
Our options would be:
1) Break the old URLs when this happens, which is bad for SEO.
2) Create new URL aliases to match the new titles, which makes many URLs for the same page, which is also bad for SEO.
A lot of this could be
A lot of this could be mitigated by the CKEditor Link module. https://drupal.org/project/ckeditor_link
It saves the link in the body as the internal link and then converts it to the url alias when it displays. A little tweaking could get it to convert aliased paths back to the internal path.
I've used it in a couple projects and with D8 including CKEditor by default I think we could get away adding it to all of the textareas on d.o.
Well, the worst thing for
Well, the worst thing for URLs and SEO is to have human unfriendly URLs. So, any improvement to URLs would be better for SEO than not improving.
There are a few choices:
How does Drupal handle paths on Module renames? I guess I could test this with a sandbox.
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Portland Drupal Developer
Maybe Documentation is a Good Place to Start
True, I think the way we use issues makes this a more challenging problem to solve.
What if we started with clean URLs on the documentation part of our site? I think this would have a bigger impact, with less complications for the following reasons:
I can't count the number of times I learned a Drupal topic the hard way, only to later find out that there was documentation on Drupal.org for it that failed to come up when I was searching for it.
The more people see the documentation, the more people will edit and update it, which makes it more relevant. This positive feedback loop is what makes Wikipedia and other community documentation so SEO-friendly. If we do what we can to get it visible in the first place, the rest can take care of itself. Low effort, big impact.
Interesting page! Perhaps if
Interesting page! Perhaps if setting the URL were an option then wiki editors could add in URLs manually for pages? I know, I'd certainly be happy to set clean user friendly urls on Media Colorbox issues.
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Portland Drupal Developer
Wow! You have noticed very
Wow! You have noticed very right problem in Drupal. First documentation required better URL for SEO than issues.
Regards,
Sandip Choudhury
www.UltraCorporatePixel.com
http://hostingultraso.com
Who cares?
Honestly, Drupal.org's Google Juice is already pretty damned good. Googling for an issue and sticking site:drupal.org into the search box tends to give very good results. (Even leaving out the site: filter tends to find drupal.org issues with alarming frequency. :-) ) There's no actual search-engine benefit here.
Additionally, we're talking about well over a million pages. That's a LOT of aliases, with probably dozens of duplicates resulting in -0, -1, and so forth. And the vast majority of those pages are not, in fact, needed for more than a week. It's a wasted effort.
Plus, issues with long titles would then result in pathetically long URLs. Let me be blunt: If your URL is so long that it word-wraps in a standard email client, your URL is too long to be useful. Pathauto with default configuration, sadly, violates that guideline quite regularly. (Yes, there are a lot of sites that violate that guideline. That means they're Doing It Wrong(tm), not that it's not a good guideline.) Just looking at the issues I am following now on Drupal.org, there's probably a dozen on my first page that would result in word-wrapping titles.
I'm -10 on pathauto-on-Drupal.org. We can get 98% of the benefit with 0% of the downsides by just judiciously adding another 20-30 aliases manually to key landing/reference pages. That just requires us to do some rudimentary IA/content strategy to decide what those are. That's way better than abdicating that responsibility to a trivial algorithm and washing our hands of it.
(And yes, I try to tell many clients the same thing. Sometimes they even listen. :-) )
Crell brings up many great
Crell brings up many great points about what's lacking in Path Auto. Path Auto is not an end all solution for enterprise websites. Google specifically recommends to avoid -0 -1 -2 URLs. I wonder if Path Auto can be configured to be more useful for Drupal.org and Enterprise websites in general to address the issues that Crell has such as trimming to a certain length and to skipping duplicates.
One of the reasons you have to attach "site:Drupal.org" or "Drupal" to searches is because Drupal.org isn't great at helping Google find it's content. Meanwhile Stack Exchange is good at it, and they come up in almost every Drupal search without the use of "Stack Exchange" in the search.
From Google's SEO Guidelines PDF:
Use words in URLs
URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.
avoid:
using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
choosing generic page names like "page1.html"
using excessive keywords like"baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm"
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Portland Drupal Developer
offtopic, but...
Did you file an issue for this? Because I'm pretty sure you could convince the maintainer to change it. Just a hunch.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
I agree
I agree with this.
I can't say I really ever have issues with finding things on drupal.org via google.
If I search with drupal as a keyword I get masses of drupal.org results, then if I specifically want more I can click the "More results from drupal.org" link.
I would probably rate searching via google for drupal.org content as fantastic.
Yes, we can find Drupal
Yes, we can find Drupal issues only in drupal.org site by giving site:drupal.org in Google. But it will come only answers from drupal.org and not from whole internet and again we have to search for in whole internet in Google by not giving the word site:drupal.org, otherwise we can not see which answer is good and accurate.
So, every time we have to search in two way for an answer.
When clients and company give pressure to complete the work quickly, then which is the best we depend upon that, and we go to another website which comes first for drupal problems.
I am not lazy, but want more perfection and speed.
However, Greg Boggs and Crell and others, thanks for your suggestion - Can you please write your opinion above in "What are the benefits?" and "What are the risk?" section.
Regards,
Sandip Choudhury
www.UltraCorporatePixel.com
http://hostingultraso.com
Is this necessary?
Drupal.org already has fantastic SEO with Google.
With my own personal website, I have gone to great time and effort to adjust URLs for SEO, and I am finding that Google pays way more attention to the title of the page in the last year than to the URL itself. Be aware that SEO practices are always shifting. URLs matter, but not nearly as much as they once did. Google is continually finding ways to rate the actual content of the page regardless of URL.
As someone mentioned above, the title may change to reflect updates, and this is bad for SEO to have a URL re-named. Many people are searching for up-to-the-minute help, and it takes time for Google to re-assign search ranking to a new URL. My vote would be against this proposal.