SEO Expert Blog

Google Webmaster Tools includes a tool called content analysis that you find in the Diagnostics section. The content analysis tool reported a suboptimal number of duplicate title tags and meta descriptions for some Drupal sites that I monitor with these tools.

Getting rid of duplicate title tags and meta descriptions caused by the pager is actually quite simple. When using the Meta Tags module with the setting ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW for Default robots meta tag: you can adjust the robots Meta tag in your theme, so that pages that contain the page parameter in the URL are not indexed using the following code snippet in the head section of your page.tpl.php template file.

Today LinuxTag 2008 started in Berlin, Germany. LinuxTag is Europe's leading exhibition on Linux and Open Source software and will go on until Saturday (May 31, 2008) at Berlin's Messezentrum unter dem Funkturm.

There is a Drupal booth (no. 217) located in Halle 7.2a organized by the Drupal User Group Berlin. And it looks like that:

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.