Development Seed Blog
Drupal Gets High Search Engine Results
If people can't find your site it doesn't matter how good it is. But thanks to the organization of Drupal, the OSS content management system we use to design most of our websites, these websites receive a high ranking with most search engines.
In a recent discussion on the CivicSpaceLabs
listserv Neil Drumm, the chief developer for CS, wrote that while CS and Drupal sites do not have a master index page for search engines it’s not needed because of the natural page linking that occurs within Drupal. Boris Mann, chief developer at , explains how and why this works:
“I can tell you that from my personal experience, Drupal sites are completely spidered by all search engines, and are naturally ranked
*very* highly. In fact, I like to say "search engine optimized by
default".
"The reason for this is the built in links to other content that
appears everywhere. e.g. pager, category links, recent posts blocks,
etc.”
Comments
Lots of improvements since 2004
I was just searching through for seo stuff on Drupal and noticed that this was still showing up quite high even though it was published in 2004. Wanted to add that it's just gotten better in the last three years. The Drupal Groups on SEO is cool:
http://groups.drupal.org/search-engine-optimization
There are a wack of new modules out there, especially those that do offer a master list of links, even in a sitemaps format:
http://drupal.org/project/gsitemap
We've also posted some stuff here:
http://openconcept.ca/seo
Anyways, just wanted to add an update.
Thanks Mike! Great update.
Thanks Mike! Great update. I have joined the SEO group on Drupal.groups.org. I love CHX's latest example...
Less than four days after posting a short and polite request to chip in for my dream laptop, googling on Toshiba R500 reveals that my humble little chipin page on Toshiba R500 is the first!
Keep up the great work.
I was just considering using
I was just considering using Drupal for my latest site redesign, so thanks, very encouraging!
I think I mentioned that I was considering using Mambo, but found that it isn't quite as powerful and customizable as Drupal -- although it is easier to install. I would have loved to use Open Source CMS, but it turns out that although the app is open source, the documentation costs. And my budget of zero has already been blown. Oh well.
But anyway, this is something I always try to explain to my clients -- an accessible website (such as those built on Drupal) is doubly valuable because it is designed to be read by assistive technologies -- robots -- and anything readable by robots is search engine friendly, too. In fact, search engines could be classified as assistive technologies in a looser sense of the term.
~Christian
Documentation Issues with OSS
You're are absolutely right that the biggest issue with OSS software is the documentation. One of the main reasons that we use Drupal, in addition to its solid foundation, is because they have a very active developers community that is constantly developing modules to plug-in. BUT many of these modules are made by developers for a particular need for one of the sites they are working on. Documentation and often even a description (of more than one line) of what the module does just isn't included. But they turn out some incredible work, quickly - modules that proprietary outfits charge $500 to $1,000 for are now free!
To help our clients with how to use Drupal, we are writing up some documentation. In the past two weeks we have posted four (4) articles:
(upload images to gallery)
(add image from gallery to a page/post)
(Block and Menu Administration)
(File Upload)
Best of all the documentation is editable – so as our clients and other users find better ways to explain how these sections of Drupal works they can just make the revisions on the site themselves.