SEO

The Week in Drupal: July 29, 2011

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 15:02:44 +0000

The Week in Drupal: July 29, 2011

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of July 22 - 29, 2011.

Drupal News

Drupal 7.5, 7.6 and 7.7 are released - Drupal 7.5 is a security release. Version 7.6 also includes bug fixes, and 7.7 is the same as 7.6, but the version string was apparently wrong in that version.

SA-CORE-2011-003 - The security issue that triggered the new release.

DrupalCon London is Sold Out

Great Posts and Tutorials This Week

Developing Mobile Apps with the Titanium Framework (Podcast)

Being an Independent Project Advisor (Podcast)

Scheduled Actions for Drupal 7

Increasing DrupalCon's Transparency

Interesting New Modules and Themes

Webform Taxonomy - Dynamically pull taxonomy terms into Webforms.

Remote Stream Wrapper - Allows you to use remote files in D7 file fields.

Feeds FTP Fetcher - Pull data from FTP for the Feeds module.

Views Title - Create SEO-friendly page titles for Views from the fields.

UC Pay After - Allow users to pay for orders after the initial checkout process in Ubercart.

Page Manager Date Context - Use date arguments for Page Manager contexts and transform them with strtotime. (+1 week, etc.)

OG Flags - Restrict the use of certain flags to members of particular Organic Groups.

CiviChimp - Synchronize CiviCRM lists with MailChimp.

Wayne EakerJuly 29, 2011

An SEO Problem with Drupal's Site Map Module & How to Fix It

Wayne Eaker — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:05:26 +0000

An SEO Problem with Drupal's Site Map Module & How to Fix It

Having recently rebuilt the Zengenuity website, it just was this week that I finally got around to setting it up on our SEOmoz account. After the initial site crawl, I was surprised to discover this:

Duplicate content in Drupal is often a problem. The URL alias system causes content to show up at multiple URLs by default. I’ve posted about this problem (and it’s solutions) before. But, I thought we doing everything right, so I was surprised to see so many duplicate content errors.

The Problem: The Site Map Module’s Default Settings

After chasing down the issue, I found that the Site Map module was the culprit. Site Map creates a simple, human-readable list of your website content using your menus items and taxonomy terms. It’s a good way to ensure that both real users and search engines know about all the content on your site. However, the default settings for the taxonomy part of the module can cause a duplicate content to show up. Here’s how:

Drupal has a built in page for each taxonomy term on your site. The URL for this page looks something like this:

https://zengenuity.com/taxonomy/term/8

If you have installed and configured the Pathauto module, this URL will probably look more user friendly. Ours looks like this:

https://zengenuity.com/blog/tags/panels-module

Theses aliases work great for normal taxonomy page links, like the ones that appear at the bottom of our blog posts. However, the aliases don't work with Site Map. Instead of using the friendly URLs by default, it appends “/all” to the original URLs. So, all the taxonomy links look like this:

https://zengenuity.com/taxonomy/term/8/all

The configuration option that controls this is here:

The reason "all" is the default is that websites with hierarchal taxonomy structures will likely want to display all content tagged with a term or any of its children. That’s what the “/all” option does. However, most sites, including this one, do not use hierarchical tags. So, this option has no effect other than to create duplicate content. When Google and other search engines index the site map page and see these "/all" links, they will index them separately from your friendly taxonomy links, and you may end up getting penalized for the content duplication.

The Solution

You should change the Site Map taxonomy setting setting to “-1” instead of “all”.

Once this is done, all the links in your Site Map page will change to their Pathauto-generated values. For sites with a flat taxonomy, there is no downside to doing this. For sites that do have hierarchical taxonomies, you can replace the standard Drupal taxonomy pages with the taxonomy_term view that comes with Views. Once you do that, you can remove the depth argument and manage the depth you want to display with the term argument.

Conclusion

Over 30,000 sites currently use the Site Map module. I’m betting that many of them have never noticed this issue before, since as site builders we rarely actually look at the site map. Luckily, this problem is pretty easy to fix, once you know it’s there. It’s just one more thing to add to your pre-launch checklist.

Wayne EakerNovember 16, 2010

Drupal Drupal Planet Search Engine Optimization SEO Site Map module Taxonomy module

The Week in Drupal: October 22, 2010

Wayne Eaker — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:38:23 +0000

The Week in Drupal: October 22, 2010

A look at interesting new modules, articles and other Drupal news of this week.

Great Posts This Week

Is your website smarter than a 12-year old? - How to use the Readability module to keep your posts understandable.

3.4 Million page views per day, 92 million per month, one server and Drupal - A presentation given at DrupalCamp Toronto on how to optimize the hell out of Drupal.

Interesting New Modules

View Google Gadget Plugin - Create Google Gadgets (for iGoogle) using Views. I need to find a project to try this out with. It sounds awesome.

Menu Minipanels - This looks interesting. We have an upcoming project where the client needs a menu that's more than what Drupal normally can handle. (formatted text, images, etc) We will give this a try.

Workflow Extensions - This looks great. Change the Workflow UI into multiple easy to understand buttons rather than radio buttons and a generic Save button.

Imagecache Proportions - CCK formatter that allows the user to pick between a few different Imagecache presets depending on the orientation of their image.

jQuery Mobile - Mobile theming with the new jQuery Mobile plugin.

Tutorials

Create Smarter Content with Alchemy for Drupal - How to do automated keyword analysis with the Alchemy module. I installed this module on our site immediately after watching this great demo.

Creating a Custom Plugin in Context - As a new user of the Context module, I appreciated this one.

Wayne EakerOctober 22, 2010

Alchemy API Alchemy module CCK formatter Context module Drupal DrupalCamp Toronto High Performance iGoogle Imagecache module SEO Views module Workflow module