Posted by yaph on January 30, 2008 at 9:42pm
A good roundup of what an SEO friendly CMS should offer by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Most of the needs are met by Drupal core and the rest can be done with contrib modules. Two questions come to my mind:
- Do you think customizable meta tags and redirects should be features of Drupal core?
- Should the fact that Drupal is a very SEO friendly system out of the box play a bigger role in marketing Drupal?
Better SEO was one of the reasons why I switched from Joomla to Drupal some time ago and I guess it's a factor for many people.
Comments
Regarding your questions: -
Regarding your questions:
- yes
- definately yes! but I would not say that drupal is a very seo friendly system, because it still misses some basic things, like alternate title-tags, keyword rich urls and mostly, a LOT of duplicate content
Drupal
Drupal doesn't have a lot of duplicate content unless you are using certain modules.
The title elements, keyword-rich URLs, etc., can be taken care of with modules...
yes, there is ofcourse a
yes, there is ofcourse a difference between modules and the core.
I would really love to see a nofollow module which makes it possible to add rel="nofollow" to specific internal links, for instance to the /user/password and /user/register pages, comment urls, etc.
There are some aspects where
There are some aspects where Drupal can improve regarding SEO. But Drupal does offer keyword rich URLs through the core path module.
To avoid duplicate content issues, you can restrict paths in the robots.txt, e.g. disallow URLs where content is aggregated. The default robots.txt includes the following lines:
This should be enough for telling robots that care about this file to not follow these URLs. Actually, this is probably the only way to tell them not to follow URLs. The nofollow attribute doesn't not necessarily mean that robots do not spider the linked pages, but that these links are not being considered in ranking algorithms.
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Websites: <a href="http://www.seo-expert-blog.com" title="SEO Expert Blog>SEO-Expert-Blog.com | Torlaune.de
robots.txt errors
Those three robots.txt rules are actually some of the ones that don't work in Drupal:
Disallow: /user/register/Disallow: /user/password/
Disallow: /user/login/
More about that issue here.
You are correct. The
You are correct. The trailing slashes need to be removed from these and other rules as outlined in the article you linked to.
A really good SEO-friendly CMS
Hi,
if you're looking for a real deal in terms of Search Engine Friendly cms - our Websitemill CMS is the best option for you. We have implemented such functions as - custom url rewriting, html title and metadata, that you can easily edit with a couple of mouse clicks - www.websitemill.net
It's worth noting that our cms is commercial but that is why we can afford timely support and new features development.
Cheers.. you can contact me for any additional details.
Are you kidding me?
Before I decide that you're a spammer and block your account, I just have to marvel at the dumbness of your comment. You come here from a proprietary CMS and try to advertise that yours can do it better? Are you even aware that Drupal easily does everything that you just mentioned, and that it's FREE? You've really got to understand that Drupal is not lacking in timely support or new feature development, either. I'm sure you'll realize that some years down the line when your proprietary system is a long forgotten effort and Drupal is still marching strong.
No kidding Rob
Hey Rob.
I don't think that my comment is dumb. I have been using drupal and joomla (more of joomla) for quite some time already and I know how frustrating it can be sometimes to figure out where to get a module that you need or where to get a better template design for the cms.
Regarding joomla - i admit that it lacks seo-friendliness to the extent that drupal does it but at the same time I believe that the latter lacks proper templates (at least according to my tastes).
Apart from that I should mention that wsm cms is not for developers that hang out in the forums and comment on and yell at each others dumb comments. It's targeted at people who just want to go online and start posting their products and ideas. Though drupal offers some good solutions you still have to some extent be a webmaster to be able to set it up or you have to hire some tech guy to do it for you.
I think that you as a developer for drupal (it's good to get to know you and your thoughts better) should understand how much money webdevelopers make using your open source cms. In case of wsm cms - we just decided to avoid the hordes of lazy people who monetize on something that was developed by others.
I know that drupal has many good chances to stand for years to come but I wouldn't put my name next to my post if I wasn't sure that wsm cms is a good option for people to consider.
And I am not advertising but offering people another option that they can review and decide in favor of whatever they find more suitable.
Ok - but it wasn't the
Ok - but it wasn't the brightest type of comment to leave within 10 minutes of making your account here. Most similar comments get marked as spam and their authors have their accounts blocked. Since it's a thread on other CMS's I see that it's a fair game comment.
Thank you Rob. It's totally ok
No worries Rob... Keep up the good work, I really appreciate what you guys at Drupal do. Good luck to us all. The world is big and there's always someone for whom what we offer is not enough.
I am planning using drupal on a couple of my own projects pretty soon, so I think I have a good chance to spam here with silly questions for you to comment on as well :)
Sorry if I over reacted.
Sorry if I over reacted.
we just decided to avoid
There are companies who use Drupal to create Web apps without giving anything back to the community. I guess the majority does not contribute directly to the project. But there are also many companies and individuals who do and they make the difference.