By geoffb on

Since switching over from another CMS to Drupal a few months back, Google Alerts no longer seems to be picking up on or sending out our new content.

I used to get a regular weekly Alerts email that showed links to all our updates. But, this stopped when we started using Drupal.

Has anybody had a similar experience or can offer a suggestions as to why this might be the case?

I know this is an issue that goes beyond Drupal but it's a weird one that I haven't been able to resolve through general research on the Net.

We migrated all our data over and it is being indexed by Google, so Google knows about us.

Although a lot of SEOs have discounted their effectiveness, I'm wondering if we need to add some content metatags. If so, I'm not sure on the best way to do that in Drupal.

Thanks in anticipation.

Geoff

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

ahneill’s picture

ahneill commented

I'm not sure about a solution to the overall issue, but if you'd like to add metatags, the "nodewords" module is very effective. You can set sitewide as well as taxonomy and per node metatags. Good luck

Art

toma’s picture

toma commented

Hi

I don't know what you mean by google alerts ? if you are talking about your position in google search engine... you need to take a look at some topics here in drupal check
Drupal seo mistakes
http://drupal.org/node/67767
other topics
http://drupal.org/search/node/drupal+seo

geoffb’s picture

geoffb commented

Toma,

Thanks for those SEO links. I'll check those out.

Google Alerts are email alerts some Google will send you at different times based on the criteria you select. Have a look at http://www.google.com/alerts.

Essentially, my guess is that it takes the word or phrase you want to be alerted about, compares that with any new content that Google has indexed and then sends you an email with a link to that content.

Geoff

toma’s picture

toma commented

Thanks for the information about google alert, i know its all about news , but its good tool to monitor keywords, content, can you explain more your case, what is your old cms? and may be its url change problem, not all cms use the same urls

geoffb’s picture

geoffb commented

Toma,

Thanks again for following up.

Further to our apparent issue with Google Alerts, I discovered our Drupal pages as a whole aren't scoring well with Drupal and I think both issues might be related.

I put another item on the Drupal forum (Google not indexing all pages) where I have explained the indexing issue.

As you seem to have a handle on how Google relates to Drupal pages, you might have some insight.

I think that it has something to do with our redirect module. I didn't write this module, but the way I believe it works is that mod_rewrite takes the stem of the URL from our old CMS, for example content.cfm?id=1234, and changes that to content/1234. Our custom Redirect module then takes this, looks it up in the table that maps the old ID with the new Drupal node and delivers that to the user.

What I am seeing in a lot of instances when I do a Google search however is that the results will include links that have a stem of /redirect/content/1234. When you click on it, it resolves to the correct URL - e.g. /article/name-of-the-article - but like peterx said in his reply to my other item, the redirects will result in a low page score.

Maybe Google is picking up the redirect URLs via the mod_rewrite. Otherwise, it maybe our Google Sitemap, I guess. I don't know, perhaps we can purge these and add a new one to effectively ask Google to crawl the site again.

Perhaps you have some suggestions?

Thanks,

Geoff

AmyStephen’s picture

AmyStephen commented

Geoff -

We are having this same problem. Were you able to resolve this? And, if so, what did you do?

Thanks!
Amy :)

AmyStephen at gmail dot com
http://OpenSourceCommunity.org

graper’s picture

graper commented

We've noticed the same situation on a site we moved from Drupal 4.6.x up to 4.7.6 as well as moved them from a windows server to a Linux server. Not sure if the problem is with Drupal, or with the server change. I wonder if there might be something in the headers that may be causing this.

Granville
Kirkham Systems