“How good is Drupal for SEO?” The answer: great Drupal SEO is easy to implement with the right SEO strategy, information and modules. However, Drupal makes it easy to shoot yourself in the proverbial SEO foot at the same time, so you have to be careful.
Fundamentally, Drupal is a great SEO friendly platform. With the right information about how and where to tweak Drupal for SEO, you can have a lean, mean SEO machine that outperforms and out-competes your competitors.
This article will quickly explore the must-have Drupal SEO friendly modules, and also look at some less well-known Drupal specific SEO issues that might help leapfrog your site to the front of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Nodewords & Meta Tags
NodeWords (Drupal 6) and Meta Tag (Drupal 7) provide hugely important META SEO (off-page) content.
In particular, you are able to configure and automate the meta keywords and description tags, as well as specify a canonical URL for each page. Canonical URLs are extremely useful because they help the search engines to decide which version of a page is the most important one (in the even of duplicates).
Global Redirect
Global redirect is IMHO, one of the most important SEO modules available. It provides a host of important functionality that helps to:
reduce duplicated content
301 redirect to node alias path
301 redirect to front page based on current URL
Instead of having multiple URL paths that all serve the same page (Drupal’s default behavior – i.e. node/123, node/123/, node/path-alias, node/path-alias/, node/PATH-ALIAS, etc), Global redirect ensures that all variants of the same content are redirected to one URL.
Path & Pathauto
Path is part of the Drupal core, and can be extended using Pathauto to automatically generate SEO and user friendly URL aliases.
Absolutely vital for SEO, and far more useful than the default node ID paths. More about how to use Path with Token for SEO a bit later.
Search 404
Search 404 is a useful little module that returns search data for URL paths that are not found. In effect, it provides SEO keyword based content instead of a 404 error.
Boost
Boost is a must-have for any site that has predominantly anonymous traffic. Boost creates static cache pages and bypasses Drupal’s processing for valid cached pages, improving your website page serving speed drastically.
Since page load speed is an important factor in SEO, Boost is now crucial.
XML Sitemap
XML Sitemap allows you to easily create a sitemap that can uploaded into Google Webmaster tools, and other search engines, to help them better crawl your website.
This module can help get your content indexed much quicker.
SEO checklist
SEO Checklist provides a helpful and handy checklist of modules you should have installed for SEO purposes, and activities you should perform to ensure that your site meets most SEO best practices for Drupal.
Drupal SEO tips and tricks
Tweaking Drupal paths for SEO
Did you know that you can use the Path module to automatically rewrite URL aliases using tokens (requires the Token module)?
This is hugely beneficial for SEO purposes. For example, you might want to rewrite the standard “content/” path with a taxonomy term. This would place content tagged with “marketing” into a path that always includes that SEO term (i.e. http://www.siteprebuilder.com/marketing/marketing-article) – far more useful than “content“.
.htaccess 301 redirects
It helps to know a bit about your .htaccess file. Usually the version you want to work on is found in the public folder (the root of your web directory). Make sure you set your server to redirect to either version of your domain (as shown here for Site prebuilder):
http://siteprebuilder.com
http://www.siteprebuilder.com
Try clicking on each version of the link. Both will end up at http://www.siteprebuilder.com. This helps avoid duplicate content penalties because, from Google’s perspective, these URL could be completely different sites.
Blocking stub pages with robots.txt
Google, and other search engines, don’t like stub pages – pages that don’t contain much content, if any.
You might not think you have any, but it’s easy for Drupal to create plenty without your knowledge. For example, are people allowed to create user accounts on your site? If so, then each user has a user page. If they don’t fill out their profile, most of those user pages will be indexed by Google as “stub pages.
Without knowing it, you could have hundreds of stub pages harming your PageRank. There are plenty of other ways to build up stub pages in Drupal. You have to be vigilant.
Writing SEO content for Drupal
Assuming you have the NodeWords or Meta Tag modules installed, then you should always write your blog post or web page titles with SEO keywords in mind.
In addition, since the first few sentences of any blog post will automatically be included as the page’s meta description, which is often return as part of search results, you need it to be something that attracts readers attention, and includes important SEO keywords.
Read “Anatomy of a blog post: How to get more traffic and social engagement from your content” for more information on how to write killer, SEO enhanced blog posts in Drupal.
Canonical URLs vs. robots.txt
Whenever possible, use canonical URLs to indicate which page the search engines should rate the highest, instead of blocking duplicates. Google prefers to crawl all content so it knows more about your website. It understands there may be some innocent duplication, and, if it knows which is the canonical URL, it won’t penalize you.
Disallow search engines access to paths and content that you know it should never need to crawl – like the user login page (you don’t want the google spider to open an account, do you?).
Pass SEO juice with 301 redirects
If you decide to change the structure of your website in any way, be sure to use 301 redirects (in your .htaccess file) to redirect links from the old URLs to the new ones. This will help to prevent google from treating the newly structured content as if it were actually new.
It also helps to prevent referral traffic (that links to the old URLs) from being sent to ‘404, page not found‘ pages on your site.
Be wary of Google’s Panda & Penguin SEO algorithm updates
The following articles will help you understand more about how to create SEO enhanced content (or how to find an SEO to do it for you) without running the risk of being penalized by Google’s new over-optimization or webspam algorithms:
How to find the best SEO service in the Google Panda & Penguin era
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are great for bloggers, marketers and business
I could go on and on. However, implementing everything mentioned in this article will set your business blog or website a long way down the right path to SEO success.
My own organic search traffic has doubled nearly every quarter for the last 18 months – a strong indication that the SEO strategies and policies that I implement (for myself and my clients) is both effective and acceptable to Google and the other search engines (i.e. Google’s Panda and Penguin updates actually help my blog posts bubble to the top of the SERPs).
Fundamentally, Drupal is a great SEO friendly platform. With the right information about how and where to tweak Drupal for SEO, you can have a lean, mean SEO machine that outperforms and out-competes your competitors.
This article will quickly explore the must-have Drupal SEO friendly modules, and also look at some less well-known Drupal specific SEO issues that might help leapfrog your site to the front of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Must have Drupal SEO modules
Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 have a number of great SEO features built into the core. However, there are several modules that are vital to excellent Drupal SEO performance:
Nodewords & Meta Tags
NodeWords (Drupal 6) and Meta Tag (Drupal 7) provide hugely important META SEO (off-page) content.
In particular, you are able to configure and automate the meta keywords and description tags, as well as specify a canonical URL for each page. Canonical URLs are extremely useful because they help the search engines to decide which version of a page is the most important one (in the even of duplicates).
Global Redirect
Global redirect is IMHO, one of the most important SEO modules available. It provides a host of important functionality that helps to:
reduce duplicated content
301 redirect to node alias path
301 redirect to front page based on current URL
Instead of having multiple URL paths that all serve the same page (Drupal’s default behavior – i.e. node/123, node/123/, node/path-alias, node/path-alias/, node/PATH-ALIAS, etc), Global redirect ensures that all variants of the same content are redirected to one URL.
Path & Pathauto
Path is part of the Drupal core, and can be extended using Pathauto to automatically generate SEO and user friendly URL aliases.
Absolutely vital for SEO, and far more useful than the default node ID paths. More about how to use Path with Token for SEO a bit later.
Search 404
Search 404 is a useful little module that returns search data for URL paths that are not found. In effect, it provides SEO keyword based content instead of a 404 error.
Boost
Boost is a must-have for any site that has predominantly anonymous traffic. Boost creates static cache pages and bypasses Drupal’s processing for valid cached pages, improving your website page serving speed drastically.
Since page load speed is an important factor in SEO, Boost is now crucial.
XML Sitemap
XML Sitemap allows you to easily create a sitemap that can uploaded into Google Webmaster tools, and other search engines, to help them better crawl your website.
This module can help get your content indexed much quicker.
SEO checklist
SEO Checklist provides a helpful and handy checklist of modules you should have installed for SEO purposes, and activities you should perform to ensure that your site meets most SEO best practices for Drupal.
Drupal SEO tips and tricks
Tweaking Drupal paths for SEO
Did you know that you can use the Path module to automatically rewrite URL aliases using tokens (requires the Token module)?
This is hugely beneficial for SEO purposes. For example, you might want to rewrite the standard “content/” path with a taxonomy term. This would place content tagged with “marketing” into a path that always includes that SEO term (i.e. http://www.siteprebuilder.com/marketing/marketing-article) – far more useful than “content“.
.htaccess 301 redirects
It helps to know a bit about your .htaccess file. Usually the version you want to work on is found in the public folder (the root of your web directory). Make sure you set your server to redirect to either version of your domain (as shown here for Site prebuilder):
http://siteprebuilder.com
http://www.siteprebuilder.com
Try clicking on each version of the link. Both will end up at http://www.siteprebuilder.com. This helps avoid duplicate content penalties because, from Google’s perspective, these URL could be completely different sites.
Blocking stub pages with robots.txt
Google, and other search engines, don’t like stub pages – pages that don’t contain much content, if any.
You might not think you have any, but it’s easy for Drupal to create plenty without your knowledge. For example, are people allowed to create user accounts on your site? If so, then each user has a user page. If they don’t fill out their profile, most of those user pages will be indexed by Google as “stub pages.
Without knowing it, you could have hundreds of stub pages harming your PageRank. There are plenty of other ways to build up stub pages in Drupal. You have to be vigilant.
Writing SEO content for Drupal
Assuming you have the NodeWords or Meta Tag modules installed, then you should always write your blog post or web page titles with SEO keywords in mind.
In addition, since the first few sentences of any blog post will automatically be included as the page’s meta description, which is often return as part of search results, you need it to be something that attracts readers attention, and includes important SEO keywords.
Read “Anatomy of a blog post: How to get more traffic and social engagement from your content” for more information on how to write killer, SEO enhanced blog posts in Drupal.
Canonical URLs vs. robots.txt
Whenever possible, use canonical URLs to indicate which page the search engines should rate the highest, instead of blocking duplicates. Google prefers to crawl all content so it knows more about your website. It understands there may be some innocent duplication, and, if it knows which is the canonical URL, it won’t penalize you.
Disallow search engines access to paths and content that you know it should never need to crawl – like the user login page (you don’t want the google spider to open an account, do you?).
Pass SEO juice with 301 redirects
If you decide to change the structure of your website in any way, be sure to use 301 redirects (in your .htaccess file) to redirect links from the old URLs to the new ones. This will help to prevent google from treating the newly structured content as if it were actually new.
It also helps to prevent referral traffic (that links to the old URLs) from being sent to ‘404, page not found‘ pages on your site.
Be wary of Google’s Panda & Penguin SEO algorithm updates
The following articles will help you understand more about how to create SEO enhanced content (or how to find an SEO to do it for you) without running the risk of being penalized by Google’s new over-optimization or webspam algorithms:
How to find the best SEO service in the Google Panda & Penguin era
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates are great for bloggers, marketers and business
I could go on and on. However, implementing everything mentioned in this article will set your business blog or website a long way down the right path to SEO success.
My own organic search traffic has doubled nearly every quarter for the last 18 months – a strong indication that the SEO strategies and policies that I implement (for myself and my clients) is both effective and acceptable to Google and the other search engines (i.e. Google’s Panda and Penguin updates actually help my blog posts bubble to the top of the SERPs).
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