Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I just recently learned about the meta robots noindex tag and realized that it could be useful in removing some of the lower quality pages in a site from the index. For example, user/ user/register user/password are all pages which frequently get indexed early and stay in the index, but which are not really useful parts of the SERPS.

I'm sure that you all can think of other pages which you would like to exclude.

My proposal for the module is pretty simple:

Greetings! I would like to announce that SpryDev today launched the Drupal SEO Podcast at http://www.sprydev.com/podcast. Over the coming months we'll be exploring all aspects of SEO on Drupal. I wanted to start out with the basics so the first podcast is rather short and covers the Page Title module. I know that's pretty basic stuff for this crowd but we wanted to get the ball rolling and it seemed a good place to start. If you have any suggestions for future topics, please let me know.

I wrote the following article on improving search results bymoving from an html site to a drupal site a little while ago and wanted to know if others have had similar conversations with clients. Basically it seems that there are a lot of folks who will toss money at techies who have a plan to increase their search engine rankings.

Hi,
I'm using the Pathauto module to define the path of nodes.
From a SEO point of view, would you recommend the use of hierarchical alias?

As an example consider the pattern for the posts of my site www.clipperz.com.

users/[user]/blog/

Every time I publish a new post

http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/2007/05/18/clipperz_compact_in_...

several index aliases are generated

http://www.clipperz.com/users/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/
http://www.clipperz.com/users/marco/blog/

I'd like to draw your attention to two significant (and possibly related) search module bugs that are leading to widespread corruption of our search indexes:

Missing nodes in search index:
http://drupal.org/node/139537

The problem is missing content. You can't find a node with the search index if it doesn't get indexed for some reason.

Duplicate entries:
http://drupal.org/node/143160

The problem is duplicated entries in the search index which bloats the index and makes potential upcoming query optimizations impossible.

When starting with Drupal recently, I was a bit startled to see that - in Garland and Aberdeen themes - there were H1 tags around site title. Removed these, easily enough.

But - I'd like to use H1 for main page title, which is surely the intended purpose, and important for SEO - Google, say, figuring that the words in H1 tags are key to describing what a page is about.

I think easy enough to do for node titles. But then, might find that get several h1 tags if have a list of node titles on a page.

Hi,

I have a quick SEO question I couldn't find any information about.

The paging in Drupal of, say, the frontpage, results to URLS like "node?page=1", even with CleanURL enabled. With Global Redirect this is even shorter, with something like "/?page=1".

I have a feeling this could be optimized to "/page/1", but I wasn't able to find any reference to this subject anywhere (though I might be missing something).

I'd be happy to hear from you on this issue, and if it is indeed SEO relevant - how to implement it.

Fili

I see this has already been covered a bit, but I wanted to share my own approach to dealing with Drupal's duplicate content issues. I've written a new article called How Duplicate Content Hurts Drupal Sites. In this article I outline how to use .htaccess and robots.txt to redirect and hide duplicate content from search engines, and discuss a few related modules.

I've been reading a lot of threads about the importance of the "Category" module (http://drupal.org/project/category) for search engine optimization (SEO).

As I understand it, the Category module enables a webmaster to control the (1) body text, (2) meta description, and (3) page title included on category/index pages (pages which are otherwise NOT nodes). Because category/index pages are the most likely (other than the home page) to be ranked high by Google, this enables you to tweak these three elements for superior search engine placement.