SEO Expert Blog

After upgrading to Drupal 6 I opted for a quick and dirty XML sitemap approach. Before I was using the XML Sitemap module which is currently available for Drupal 6 as a development snapshot or directly from CVS. The module offers settings for priority and change frequency. Moreover the module allows for adding taxonomy term and user URLs to the sitemap.

I only wanted nodes and the front page to appear in the sitemap's XML output without priority or change frequency information. Having the path and pathauto modules enabled, which ensure that every node gets a meaningful and search engine friendly URL, a simple database query joining two tables is enough to get the necessary data for all published nodes.

This site is now running on Drupal 6, yeah! The basic part of the upgrade process was straightforward:

• Backing up the site with a backup script.
• Deactivating all contrib modules and themes.
• Moving the Drupal 5 files to a new directory.
• Unpacking Drupal 6 and contrib modules in the web root directory.
• Running the database update script.
• Activating contrib modules and themes.
• Running the database update script again.

If you plan to upgrade a Drupal site without having done so before, I highly recommend this screencast by Angie Byron. The video walks you through upgrading a site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5, but most of the information applies to a Drupal 5 to 6 upgrade as well. Also read the Upgrading Handbook.

In this short video Search Engine Marketer Brian Chappell recommends some basic SEO measures for a Drupal site. Since Drupal is very search engine friendly out of the box, there are not many things you need to do.

Brian recommends to activate the core path module and to additionally install the Page Title, Global Redirect, and Meta Tags modules. In his accompanying blog post are also some notes on the .htaccess and robots.txt files.

Drupal 6 was released today. One of the most exciting new features to me — I only recently learned about — is that the AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) framework made it into the Drupal core. This means you can create asychronous HTTP request, commonly referred to as AJAX, without writing a single line of JavaScript code.

The new Forms API comes with an #ahah attribute that lets you specify the trigger event, e.g. a mouse click, the callback URL that will be requested after the event occurred and the ID value of the HTML element where the server response will be displayed. Pretty awesome stuff.

ShoppingAds (formerly AuctionAds) is a Drupal module for adding shoppingads.com CPA and CPC advertising banners to nodes of selected node types.

Module Features

• Enter ad keywords or let them be added automatically by using the terms associated with a node.
• If terms are used as ad keywords you can limit the number of terms to be used as search terms.
• Restrict terms used as ad keywords to a selected vocabulary.
• Select from 12 Ad formats.
• Support for shoppingads ad campaigns.
• Select the weight to position the ads above or below the content.
• Select whether to display ads in full view and or teaser view.
• Select the node types you want ads to be displayed.
• Enter color values for border, background, heading, description and links.
• Select the ad style or attitude.
• Specify whether to open ad links in new windows.