I was sorry to be out of town and miss the first meeting since I joined the group, particularly as I really would have liked to learn more about Search Engine Optimization On that theme, I have a question now I am wondering whether you covered or whether anyone has any insight into. I tried asking on the Drupal forum but no one responded. Perhaps, since SEO is in focus here at Drupal Austin, some people will find it interesting to address this question.
What is better for blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Drupal or Wordpress? I AM NOT ASKING about the relative merits of each in terms of blog usability, flexibility, etc, which I know is addressed elsewhere (i.e. I know Wordpress is easier for beginners if you just want a basic blog. . . and Drupal allows a lot more flexibility for different kinds of content and expandability). I am trying to make the best choice for a blog with SEO front in mind.
Please assume for this discussion that the Wordpress modules and codes are being used so that robots will not follow links to duplicate pages (i.e. the same page listed with a url in archives, in categories, in rss feeds). I understand this to be the main difference between Drupal and Wordpress for SEO. Drupal taxonomy allows for more flexible category views and thus less duplication (correct?). So, if this issue is removed for Wordpress, do the two systems work equally well for SEO (again, specifically for BLOGS only).? Is there anything else that makes one significantly better than the other? Hw much differencee is there likely to be?
Comments
That IS a good question!
I have used both and have achieved great results from both. I love Drupal more in general but you said not to talk about that. ;-)
Let me preface this by saying that the last Wordpress website I built for SEO was 2 years ago. For that reason, I'll talk about the merits of Drupal rather than the drawbacks I experienced with WordPress. From an SEO perspective, I think that Drupal with the proper SEO Modules installed is a superior platform. I found it far more flexible for title and description tags than WordPress. The title tag is probably the single most important part of on-page SEO. Plus, with a combo of clean URLs, the Path Module and the PathAuto Module, your URLs will be super-search friendly, too. Duplicate content is taken care of by the global redirect Module. Also, it supports podcasting out of the box. Oh, also, don't forget about the power of versioning in Drupal that you don't get anywhere else. Tweak a page for the engines. If it drops, just revert it. Sweet!
So, let's say for the sake of argument that in the last couple of years WordPress has caught up with all this and they are equal systems from an SEO perspective. (I'm not conceding that, but just for the sake of this discussion....) The one thing that makes Drupal better is that it is far more sophisticated. A big part of SEO is making sure that your site appears just how you want it to both the Search Engines and users. When using WordPress, I found that it was really complicated to get all the pages to render properly in just the way I wanted. Plus, the way they handle content is pretty...rough. It's difficult to create Views the way Drupal let's you. Yes, there's probably more of a learning curve with Drupal but if you're serious about the long run results, I think it's a better system.
If you want to know what all the proper configurations are for Drupal SEO then you won't have long to wait. I'm putting together my top list of mods and tweaks to drupal for my next, next podcast. (I'm putting one up tomorrow - it's the next one you want). So, if you can't wait a week or two then go with these for now:
Excerpt (Try it, but it will be obsolete in version 6, I think...)
Find URL Alias
Global Redirect
Google Analytics
XML Sitemap
Page_title
Release Monitor
Scheduler
Search_keywords
Search 404
Pathauto
Views
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