{"id":1961,"date":"2014-12-10T15:25:52","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T15:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aseohosting.com\/blog\/?p=1961"},"modified":"2025-02-28T12:32:30","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T12:32:30","slug":"optimizing-drupal-for-google-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aseohosting.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/optimizing-drupal-for-google-search\/","title":{"rendered":"Optimizing Drupal For Google Search"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: This guide assumes at least a basic knowledge of Drupal, including module installation. If you run into trouble, read through the <\/i>Drupal Tutorial.<\/i><\/p>\n

It may not be as popular as WordPress, but you\u2019ll nevertheless find plenty of website owners who swear religiously by Drupal. It\u2019s not hard to see why, really. There\u2019s a lot to love about it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an incredibly secure platform and frequently updated besides. Drupal\u2019s also easy to customize, with a bevy of both free and premium plugins available to webmasters and an intuitive web interface that makes it ideally suited to manage a large volume of content. Last but certainly not least, it\u2019s extremely powerful from an SEO standpoint.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany SEO experts agree that Drupal is the ideal platform for developing search-friendly websites,\u201d writes Udemy\u2019s Nick Gibson. \u201cThanks to Drupal\u2019s huge community of developers, there are plenty of plug-ins available that make optimizing your website for search simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not wrong. There may well be more SEO-geared plugins for Drupal than for any other platform(WordPress included), and most of them are quite well-made. Of course, plugins alone won\u2019t get your PageRank up. To truly succeed, you\u2019re also going to need a solid understanding of SEO.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we\u2019re here.<\/h2>\n

Now, the basic rules of search engine optimization – the same ones we covered in our SEO guide – all apply to Drupal as they would any content management system. That means you\u2019re still going to need to do keyword research. You\u2019re still going to want to make sure your page loads quickly and has a decent layout. And last but certainly not least, you\u2019re still going to need to tweak your site\u2019s names, titles, headings, meta tags, and urls.<\/p>\n

With all that in mind, there are a few additional steps a savvy webmaster needs to take if they\u2019re going to fully optimize their Drupal installation.<\/p>\n

Setting Up Your Drupal Sitemap<\/b><\/h2>\n

First thing\u2019s first, you\u2019re going to want to set up a sitemap so that your website\u2019s easier to crawl – a fairly involved process in and of itself. The fastest way to go about doing this, according to icanlocalize<\/a>, is to download the XML Sitemap<\/a> module. Install it just as you would an ordinary module, then navigate to the Configuration Page.<\/p>\n

Now, you probably aren\u2019t going to be changing a whole lot here.\u00a0Learn about the different options. This is important if you need to change one. Change anything you think needs adjusting. Once your site setup is good, your next step is to run Cron. Go to your Drupal URL. Add \/cron.php to the end. Let it run until the page stops loading. This will populate the XML sitemap for you.<\/p>\n

Finally, once you\u2019ve finished all of this, all you need to do is submit your Sitemap to Google<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Modifying Your Site\u2019s Robots.txt<\/b><\/h2>\n

There\u2019s one more step you might consider, in addition to populating a sitemap and carrying out on-page optimization: editing your site\u2019s Robots.txt. Although the basic Robots.txt file provided by Drupal is quite passable, there are a few tweaks you could implement in order to further optimize things. You can find the file at \/robots.txt, at which point it can be opened in your command line editor.<\/p>\n

icanlocalize gives a few examples of the changes you could potentially make here<\/a>. Let\u2019s say, for example, your website\u2019s extremely fast – you might consider changing the Crawl-delay value to five seconds. If you\u2019re running a website that allows for user-uploaded content, you could add the Disallow line to prevent a particular file type or directory from showing up in search. Last but certainly not least, the Bad-Robot User-agent could be used to get back at content scrapers.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of other modifications you could make, mind you. Documentation with a more complete list of commands and functions can be found robotstxt website<\/a>. Make sure you create a backup before modifying anything.<\/p>\n

A List Of Awesome SEO Plugins<\/b><\/h2>\n

We\u2019ll wrap things up with links to some of the best SEO plugins ever developed for Drupal. Installing these in addition to all the other advice given here can give your website exactly the boost it needs to rank and draw in a torrent of new visitors. Have a look at a few of our recommendations:<\/p>\n