Drupal SEO alert - issue with Meta Tags (nodewords) module and robots option

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laken's picture

Since several people in our group are interested in SEO they may be running the Drupal Meta Tags module (http://drupal.org/project/nodewords). Apparently there is an issue in the module where, if certain config options are set, it will completely exclude your site from Google! Here's what my colleague Owen Barton just sent out about this:

Just a quick note for anyone configuring the meta tags module - it appears that if you enable robots tag support, the default configuration will add noindex,nofollow to listing pages (but it's detection of a listing page seems to be somewhat faulty, so it could end up doing it on all pages). This just happened to us on civicactions.com (unfortunately on all pages). To fix, simply uncheck the robots checkbox. I think the reasoning behind this "feature" is to prevent the "duplicate content penalty", however the "duplicate content penalty" is pretty much non-existent unless you are actually running blatant link-farms or clone sites - see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicat... for more details. Obviously the penalty for not having any pages indexed at all is much higher :)

A little searching turned up this issue in that module's queue: http://drupal.org/node/786270

So in short, for now, if you use that module, uncheck the 'robots' checkbox or you may be hiding your site from the search engines!

Comments

Contrib alert

opegasus's picture

Much thanks Owen and Andy!

Yes I am using that module. Thank you for this alert.

Current Release

scottrouse's picture

Andy,

Are you sure that's still valid for the current release? I've not run into that issue at all, and I'm using nodewords on almost every site I have.

-Scott

Issue linked has been fixed

dave reid's picture

Issue linked has been fixed already in the latest beta release.

Senior Drupal Developer for Lullabot | www.davereid.net | @davereid

Honored!

laken's picture

Thanks for stopping by our little group, Dave, appreciate the update. Say hi to Bevan for me!

Issue fixed.

opegasus's picture

Thanks Dave.

Western Montana

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