SEO for Drupal

I am using Drupal for over 3+ years now (I had started with v4.6, now v7.0 is in production) and undoubtedly drupal is one of the most powerful open source CMS in the world. Its been used by some of the biggest sites in the world (MTV, Sony, Amnesty etc) and to me is one of the most search engine friendly CMS if you think of its power and flexibility. The only problem with drupal is, its not built solely for SEO and not by search engine specialist (they are all crazy programmers) hence though it can be tweaked into a super SEO friendly site, you need to know everything about it.

I have Never seen any SEO guide on drupal specially for latest version 5.x and 6.x so I felt to write one myself. This is my pay back to such amazing people who are working day and night to build drupal. If you have subsequent questions you can ask them in comments.

Here the Complete Guide to Do SEO for Drupal.

Basic SEO for Drupal

1. Make sure You enable clearn urls and install pathauto module. This is the first step in making your drupal site search engine friendly. Also make sure you get the path settings right for all the content types. By default, Drupal create urls like /content/this-is-page but you can change it to suit your site more, say /review/nike-shoes etc

2. Use Global Redirect module to avoid all kind of content duplication. Since by detault a page can be accessed with two urls /node/317 and /content/this-is-url , this causes lot of duplication and confuses search engines. Global redirect avoid all such problems by 301 redirecting /node/xxx types of urls to their corresponding urls.

3. Use Meta Keywords (Nodewords) module to put description and meta keywords on any page.

4. Use page Title Module which gives custom title meta tag. This is a great module as you can target two similar keywords in search engines, using title meta tag and actual title of the page (displaying it with H1 tag)

5. robots.txt - Though its always better to use and edit robots.txt manually, you can use robots.txt module to generate robots.txt file automatically. Its perfect if you are running multiple sites on drupal.

6. Use XMLSitemap to create sitemaps which are very handy on big sites and ecommerce sites to get the pages indexed in google and other search engines.

7. SEO checklist is another good module which you can use on your drupal site. The module itself don’t do much but provides a checklist of SEO modules which you can install on your site.

Advanced SEO for Drupal

1. Avoid modules using 302 redirect - There are few modules of drupal (like wikitools) which uses 302 redirection instead of 301 redirection. Since 302 is considered to be temporary redirection, you should always do 301 redirection. Make sure if you are using any such module (which rewrites urls), it is doing 301 redirection.

2. Theme Edits - Drupal has a great template system and you can make lot of search engine friendly moves from the view itself which is perfect for someone who don’t want to write modules for small features. If you are looking to have different titles meta tags for different content types or you want something different for only one page, you can use these themes to do so. For example, for a page /node/117, you can create a theme copying page.tpl.php and change it looks. Similarly for content types, make a copy of node.tpl.php file.

3. Remove Content Duplication - Ideally you want to remove all kind of content duplication on your drupal site, so you can add the following code in your robots.txt file to block spiders indexing the content.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /aggregator/
Disallow: /comment/reply
Disallow: /node/add
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /tracker/
Disallow: /user/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*feed

This is just a basic SEO guide for drupal but it covers everything which you need on drupal. You can ask any questions related to drupal and seo in comments.

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Other Related posts:

1. 5 Most Common SEO Mistakes
2. 11 Best Wordpress Plugins for SEO
3. How to Stop Google Caching your pages in its index ?
4. Demystifying Robots Meta Tags
5. Tagging, Tag Clouds and Problems with Content Duplication