SEO suggestions for groups.drupal.org

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
greggles's picture

Hi SEO Group,

There's an issue for updating the titles/keywords here on groups.drupal.org to be a bit more searcher friendly. I started digging into it and realized it would be best to get more advice from the experts on this one.

So, if you are looking for fame and glory as one of the people who helped improve the SEO for groups.drupal.org (i.e. credit in blog post and/or tweets) lay down your research and ideas for how we can make this site easier for people to find.

In particular, I'm looking for:

  • Updates to the mission text that shows on the home page
  • Ideas for better title text (perhaps we should add in and use the page_title module)
  • Primary navigation tweaks

Thanks!

Comments

Page title

Michelle's picture

I had issues with the Page Title module conflicting with Page Manager / CTools and had to disable it. It's been a while and maybe that's fixed and maybe it wouldn't be an issue with OG Panels but I thought I'd mention it just in case.

Michelle

explanation?

greggles's picture

Seriously? I came back to see what's going on and see that not only are there relatively few ideas but somebody even voted down on this conversation?

Perhaps the person who voted down wants to explain why they voted that way?

what is this "optimize" you speak of?

emmajane's picture

What a HUGE project. As I'm sure you know it's hard to optimize a site for everything. Some groups do exceptionally well in their search engine rankings. Most sort of suck. It'd be up to the individual groups to "fix" their keywords.

A few (basic) ideas to make the site more accessible to search engines:

  • Update URLs to use g.d.o/group-name/nid (yes, this will NOT work nicely for people like me who cross-post to multiple groups)
  • Add the Global Redirect module (http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect) so that people can cross post AND have nice URLs.
  • Adjust the front page title to put description first and site name second.
  • Clicking on the "Groups" primary link tab gives you a keyword-ugly page. Get rid of the columns for user name, "Join" and group count.
  • By default on the "Groups" page sort the list according to some kind of "hotness" rating (large groups first? recent post first?)
  • Overhaul the layout for the groups page and have instead blocks for: New groups, Popular Working Groups, Popular Regional Groups with "more" links from each of these
  • Merge "Event Planning" groups into Geographical or Working Groups as appropriate. Merge "Distribution" groups into "Working Groups." Focus on text based links to each of these groups instead of form-based filters.
  • Do we have a site map? We should. http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap
  • What are the stats like for http://groups.drupal.org/events ? Is there a better way to present this information without duplicating content? Perhaps just a list of "Upcoming events" instead of a calendar view?
  • Replace groups.drupal.org with the Group Name in the page title i.e. <title>[node-title], [group-name]<title> (see above re. Canonical URLs).
  • What's the deal with the "site wide tags" on some posts? Instructions are: "Add any tags which you deem relevant for this post. Separate tags with a comma. This data is aggregated across all of groups.drupal.org." The taxonomy term pages adds duplicate content throughout the site and we don't seem to take advantage of the meta data that users are adding to their posts. Other than, "tags are cool" how is this being used? Is it still appropriate? Or are we just risking content duplication with this feature?
  • Remove the <h1> tag from the list of allowed tags in all Input Formats.
  • Create a sensible page title and URL alias for "Working Group" and "Geographical" main categories (see mission text suggestions below).

Revised mission text suggestion:

Looking for a meetup, user group or DrupalCamp in your area? Drupal users are active all over the world. Find and participate in your local community in our <a href="http://groups.drupal.org/og/all?title_oper=contains&title=&gt_tid[]=141">Geographical Listing of Drupal Groups</a>.

Want to find out more about your favorite module, theme or install profile? Our working groups allow the Drupal community to ask questions, and get help on their topic of interest. Find groups of interest in our <a href="http://groups.drupal.org/og/all?title_oper=contains&title=&gt_tid[]=142">Drupal Working Groups</a>.

I hope that list of suggestions is a useful jumping off point for other ideas as well. :)

Which groups are performing poorly?

dhthwy's picture

I looked at http://drupal.org/node/797932 and "Seattle Drupal Meetup" ranks within the top 5 (actually #3 if you don't count the indented results). I don't know if there was a ranking increase due to recent changes.

I'm seeing lots of duplicate titles. Paginated results all have the same title for each page, for example. This is neither good for users nor for search engines.

The page title for the URL @ http://groups.drupal.org/groups?page=1 should say "Working and regional Groups & Meetups - Page 2 | groups.drupal.org"

Re: emmajane

She brings up some great ideas. I'll comment on a few of them.

Update URLs to use g.d.o/group-name/nid (yes, this will NOT work nicely for people like me who cross-post to multiple groups)

This may help some (particularly for link anchor text when people link to the group using its URL as the anchor text), but not worth it if it's too hard to do.

Adjust the front page title to put description first and site name second.

I think this is backwards =P. g.d.o's frontpage title should identify itself as groups.drupal.org at the very beginning.

Clicking on the "Groups" primary link tab gives you a keyword-ugly page. Get rid of the columns for user name, "Join" and group count.

I agree with this, except for taking out the member count. Reason:
There are a lot of links @ http://groups.drupal.org/groups
In order place more weight on the groups any links that aren't necessary for the user should be removed.

  • Manager column
  • Is this really needed? The user can get that information on the group page.

  • Join column
  • How do I know I want to join before I've even looked at the group?

  • Members count column
  • Users may find this important, plus it adds uniqueness to the page, I wouldn't remove this.

If this isn't doable an alternative (infact this is preferrable) would be to link to an HTML (not XML) sitemap (at the footer of the page) which provides a categorized listing of groups (without any pagination). Examples of HTML sitemaps: http://www.google.com/sitemap.html http://pages.ebay.com/sitemap.html

Having an XML sitemap is fine too, but not necessary.

Anyway, I think the primary issues are:

  • See about fixing duplicate page titles, make them unique in some way.
  • Make group page titles and mission statements more descriptive.
  • "Seattle | groups.drupal.org" doesn't tell me at all what this group is about except that it has something to do with Seattle. Titles should include a short summary about the page. They should follow a similar pattern: Group name | group.drupal.org | short summary here

  • See about adding an HTML sitemap and also possibly an XML sitemap (lesser priority).

Keyword order for page titles

emmajane's picture

re. the front page title: In page titles (and anything else you want to optimize) the most important words come first. I don't see any reason why we'd want to optimize for the keyword "groups.drupal.org" which is why I recommend putting the description first and the site name second.

homepage thoughts

greggles's picture

In general I like putting the sitename first on the homepage for the reasons cited earlier.

For g.d.o I think that it's not so important because it's just the domain name and not really the "site name".

Maybe a compromise is to change it from "groups.drupal.org | " to "Drupal Groups | " since that is

  • More useful than just repeating the domain name
  • More keyword focused
  • More accurate to the site

I'd also be up for something broader "Drupal Community | ..." but that may be overstepping the bounds of what this site "really" is.

What are people searching for?

emmajane's picture

Adding "Drupal" definitely helps. Do people really search for the term "groups" though? Maybe "Drupal User Groups"? Yes there's more than just DUGs groups on the site, but if you're trying to focus on SEO you need to think like a search engine. :)

i hate typing a subject for a reply

dhthwy's picture

'user(s)' could just go in the mission statement too.

If I was searching for the Seattle Drupal Group I'd naturally search for 'seattle drupal group' or 'seattle drupal users group'. Both come up as #1 on Google because 'users' is mentioned in the mission statement and 'group' also matches 'groups'.

And yes, people are searching for 'seattle drupal users group'

re

dhthwy's picture

groups.drupal.org matches both 'groups' and 'drupal' keywords even tho it may seem like it doesn't, however changing that to 'Drupal Groups' is a better and more exact match, may make more sense to users, and probably be a bit more helpful to rankings.

Group titles should target the group's name, 'Drupal Groups', and a short summary of the group's primary focus (if provided) will naturally target other keywords. But you'd want the group name and 'Drupal Groups' to come at the beginning so the user can easily see that it is in fact a g.d.o page instead of some other page on yahoo, or meetup.com (it's a branding thing). Plus, the most important keywords of a group is the group's name, as well as 'Drupal Groups'.

I can help to make a better

toma's picture

I can help to make a better seo, just need some keywords that you want to be top rank, for better optimization, i need some keyword list to begin a study.