Why Drupal Wins the SEO Battle

It doesn't take very long to find good examples of how well-suited Drupal is for large, complex websites. Some big names in the house include the White House and Warner Bros. Records. But while Drupal is hands-down the best option for an extensible website, how does it fare in search engine optimization?

Out of the box, Drupal will check if you can use Clean URLs and recommend adjustments to make if it finds that you can't. Clean URLs allow you to change your URL from the poor http://www.example.com/index.php?q=node/123 format to http://www.example.com/node/123. This is mostly a user experience enhancement, but search engines tend to not consider URL parameters as in the former example.

Drupal Core includes a module, Path, that allows you to change the URL of your nodes to something the search engines will love. Search engines tend to consider keywords in URLs pretty high up on their list in ranking results. By changing the URL of your node to the title or another keyword-rich phrase, your node will be more likely to rank well.

Changing URLs manually on every post, though, can get really old really fast. This is where Pathauto comes in handy. Pathauto allows you to set rules for forming search engine friendly URLs on the fly. Where WordPress generally allows one format for "permalinks", Drupal allows unique formats for each content type.

However, there will be links that somehow get made to your node/123 URL rather than your Path or Pathauto URL. The search engines will see this as duplicate content and will likely penalize you for it. So how do you fix this? The Global Redirect module creates 301 redirects from the node/123 URL to your keyword-rich URL and effectively fixes the duplicate content issue.

So what about independent page titles and metatags for each node? Most search engines highly consider the title tag of a page, and so keyword-rich (but natural) titles tend to enhance search engine ranking. But what if you want one title for your node's H1 or "official" title and another in the title tag? The Page Title module allows you to do this. As for your metatags such as description and keywords (among a plethora of other node-related information), Nodewords is an excellent module.

Finally, sitemaps tend to enable the search engines to crawl your website and index content more efficiently. By installing a sitemap on your website and submitting it to the search engines, your new content will likely show up in the engines sooner, and obscure content will be more likely to show up in results. I prefer the XML Sitemap module. It automatically regenerates the sitemap on each cron run if there have been changes to your website. This ensures that an up-to-date sitemap is always available.