“Is Drupal SEO friendly?” It’s a question that we hear a lot — and with good reason. Our clients know that search engine success could make or break their online efforts. Some will say it’s overrated, but like it or not, “SEO” remains one of the top buzzwords in the industry.
To answer the question, “Is Drupal SEO Friendly?”, we need to first define what we mean by the question. If the question is whether Drupal sites inherently do better in the search engines, the answer is unfortunately “No.” What we can say (and what we do tell our clients) is that Drupal, with the help of a few modules, makes it easy for you to do the things that tend to result in a higher rate of search engine success. In other words, Drupal makes it easy to practice good SEO. Here are some examples:
Clean (“Pretty”) URLs – Out of the box, Drupal includes the ability to give pages on your site aliases, so instead of something ugly like “yoursite.com/node/23″, you can pick something nice like “yoursite.com/products/baseball”. The latter is easier for people to read, and search engines prefer it as well. With the addition of the Pathauto module, your site will automatically generate URLs that match the content you create. SEO friendly URLs will be created for you without any extra effort on your part.
Global Redirect – Once you’ve created URL aliases, you’ll effectively be left with two URLs that go to the same page – the pretty one, and the default system one. This poses a bit of a problem. As you may know, Google frowns upon duplicate content, and penalizes this content in its rankings. In addition, you may find that some people are linking to one URL and others are linking to the other, which isn’t desireable for a number of reasons. Fortunately, the Global Redirect module solves all these problems by setting up permanent redirects to your URL aliases. In the eyes of Google, the two “pages” will be one and the same.
Page Title – The title tag is widely recognized as a key element in every page’s ranking in the search engine. As you might guess from its name, the Page Title module gives you greater control over the title tag for the content you create.
MetaTags – Meta keywords and meta description are still believed to play an important role in search engine rankings. In addition, meta descriptions provide search engines with text to display on the results page. The MetaTags module provides fields to make it as painless as possible to generate this meta data when you add content to your site. Between Page Title and MetaTags, you’re free to SEO to your heart’s content.
The Meta Description at Work
Site map – The Site map module will dynamically create a complete sitemap for your site. The creation of a sitemap ensures that the search engines will begin to crawl your new site as soon as possible, which means you’ll spend less time waiting for your content to show up in Google’s search results.
Analytics – This module does one thing, and it does it well. The Analytics module makes it easy to install Google Analytics on your site. All you need to do is plug in your unique tracking code, and you’re done. While this addition doesn’t directly impact your SEO, it deserves inclusion because keeping track of your analytics numbers is critical to your overall SEO campaign. Once you can begin to see what works and what doesn’t, you can do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Matt Farina // May 7, 2009 at 10:36 am
What do you mean by SEO Friendly? The difference between SEF and SEO can get very muddled.
For example, drupal does not do SEO. SEO gets into knowing the search words and phrases people are using for your thing and them integrating them into your content. Drupal doesn’t do this.
On the other hand a system can be SEF (search engine friendly). The means that the data is easy for search engines to read and understand. Drupal, especially with the modules you listed, can be fairly good at this.
But, what’s SEO Friendly? Do you really mean SEF.
This is one of those things a lot of biz people who want sites don’t quite grasp. A little education here could go a long way.
2 greggles // May 7, 2009 at 10:38 am
Any chance you could link to the modules involved?
The SEO Group is probably also worth mentioning for more details on these modules and more strategies http://groups.drupal.org/search-engine-optimization
3 Nicholas Thompson // May 7, 2009 at 6:04 pm
I wrote a similar article a while ago on Drupal SEO…
4 Dave Hansen-Lange // May 8, 2009 at 2:38 am
Actually this is not correct. There is no penalty for duplicate content. See my post on the Global Redirect module and why it won’t do much to help you:
http://www.advomatic.com/blogs/dave-hansen-lange/dark-arts-seo-and-why-global-redirect-wont-help-you
This is also incorrect. Googlebot will not crawl any faster if you have a sitemap. The only thing that a sitemap does is help the bots get to content that they can’t find by crawling. But if the bots can’t get to your content, chances are your users can’t either. In which case a sitemap is only fixing the symptom.
The only other scenario where it might help is when you have content being created faster than the bots can index it. This only applies to really deep content, they’ll find stuff on your front-page without issue. But really deep frequently updated content is probably something like a new spam comment on that 3 year old blog post. Not really worth worrying about.
Please don’t add to the misinformation around SEO, there’s enough of that out there already.
5 Dave Hansen-Lange // May 8, 2009 at 2:43 am
And I should’ve reinforced the fact that content and inbound links are the kings of SEO. All these little tweaks pale in comparison to writing good copy, in semantic markup, that is linked to widely from the outside world.
Case in point drupal.org uses none of these tricks and has a pagerank of 8 (used to be 9).
Also IMHO Page Title and MetaTags are a bad idea. On your average site content writers are not SEO experts nor should we expect them to be.
6 Harry // May 8, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Thanks for the comment, Matt. I agree. As I said, Drupal makes it easier to do SEO, but it isn’t SEO on its own. I should have been more clear in the blog that content is ultimately king, and the quality of your content will play the biggest role in its success (or lack thereof).
7 Harry // May 8, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Dave-
Thanks for the comments. I agree wholeheartedly that content and inbound links are incredibly important aspects of SEO, and will have a larger impact on your success than the modules mentioned above.
While I don’t believe that any of these individual modules will have an earth-shattering impact, I do believe that taken together, they will improve your chances of search engine success.
More specifically:
I am aware that Google has been playing down the duplicate content issue. Still though, I think it’s more elegant and logical for users and Google alike to always show one URL. Global Redirect’s fairly widespread use indicates that I am not alone in thinking this.
Regarding Sitemaps, Google has this to say in their Webmaster Help:
“Sitemaps are particularly helpful if: Your site is new and has few links to it.”
Also,
“Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion…Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.”
According to Google then, a Sitemap could have a positive impact, and at worst will have no effect.
Finally, regarding Page Title and MetaTags, I do see your point, but I believe that a content creator with a little bit of SEO education can create title and meta tags that are more beneficial than no tags at all (or in the case of title tags, better than the default). Keep in mind that Page Title can also be used by the developer to create better title patterns.
Thanks again for your comment. I may have made SEO appear a bit too cut-and-dried in this post, and it’s good for people to see how much disagreement there can be on these topics.
8 Harold // May 8, 2009 at 3:36 pm
>What do you mean by SEO Friendly? The difference between SEF and SEO can get very muddled.
Oh get off it. We all know what the guy means. Talk about trying to showcase “knowledge” over semantics.
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