By domineaux on

I've got my Drupal site up with about 50 landing pages... I think

I have created over 50 pages that can be called by unique domain pointers separately.

examples:

www.mylittledomain.com/contact
www.mylittledomain.com/about_us

I can access the site as above----

www.mylittledomain.com/city/Los_Angleles
www.mylittledomain.com/city/Dallas
www.mylittledomain.com/city/Atlanta

I can access the content pages as above----

I am using the path addon with the Easy URLs currently.

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Currently, I have download the follow addons to install

PageTitle
nodewords
gsitemap

I am pretty well convinced the PageTitle must be created for every page, which I plan to do.
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I think everything is going well, but I have several questions for best SEO

1. Will the search engines spider my site?

2. Can I submit each of my landing pages separately?

---- 2a. The pages do have some unique content from each other. Yet, all have the core linking back to Home Page.
Could this be a problem.

The site is non-profit with unique situations in each city served. Having core type homepage isn't a problem for me.
I'm just wondering if a site setup in such fashion is a good SEO candidate?

I've built sites HTML with separate pages, and put a domain pointer on each site. All the pages were standalone with
separate URLs and one common domain pointer. I submitted the separate pages and never have had a problem.
I'm curious as problems with having homesite URL pointers on each page I've created is a best way situation.

Sorry, I don't have luxury to wait and see. I put a similar site up using another CMS over a year ago with a similar number
of pages and the pages are so deep back in the search I gave up after going through 12 pages of google. I really need to
get this better search indexed position or I need to go to the HTML.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Irrow’s picture

Irrow commented

1)
That will depend on your websites structure and page rank, theres no definite yes or no, just best practices.

IF you have a good page structure, minimal duplicate content and a decent amount of links pointing to your pages you 'should' do well in the search engines. In our experience a well designed drupal website will perform as well as a well designed static website (and is a lot easier to maintain); whereas the same definitely can't be said for a number of other solutions such as mambo / joomla out there.

2 )
Submit? if by submit you mean submitting to the search engines then you 'can' but its a bad idea. Your much better of getting good incoming links to your homepage / subpages and letting google discover your website. Submitting webpages to the major search engines doesn't affect your rank and may get you flagged for spamming. Either way don't do it.

2a)
The general consensus seems to be that pages with 70% or greater similarity may trigger the content filters; however if I understand your question correctly, then that should not be a problem. Make sure you have at least a paragraph of unique text, preferably half a page + per page and you'll be fine.

P.S.
You want to use pathauto for the url's, creates nice and clean url's automatically. You should also look into using the latest page title along with the token module to automatically create appropriate page titles for you. (I haven't personally done this, as the functionally appears quite new)

You 'could' consider making each city a subdomain, google tends to love subdomains.. however you'd want a decent amount of unique text per subdomain, and you probably want to be careful adding too many at once. Not to mention that you may have issues integrating the subdomain solution into drupals logic (a clever htaccess file could probably do it, it's something I've been thinking about trying for awhile yet never got around to).

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http://www.irrow.com/

domineaux’s picture

domineaux commented

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you said:

You 'could' consider making each city a subdomain, google tends to love subdomains.. however you'd want a decent amount of unique text per subdomain, and you probably want to be careful adding too many at once. Not to mention that you may have issues integrating the subdomain solution into drupals logic (a clever htaccess file could probably do it, it's something I've been thinking about trying for awhile yet never got around to).

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http://www.irrow.com/

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You made a very good point. This might be a very interesting project. I can see why Google and other search engines would love subdomains.

I used to sign up on the subdomain type things for building my free sites. There are still a lot of subdomain type sites with a lot of good information on them. It would make sense the search engines would spider subdomains as they do domains.

I have enough sites up that I either built or maintain that I use a reseller domain account. The reason I say this... I believe I have access through the account/WHM to create and maintain subdomain accounts pretty easily. I need to look into this.

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You said:

You want to use pathauto for the url's, creates nice and clean url's automatically. You should also look into using the latest page title along with the token module to automatically create appropriate page titles for you. (I haven't personally done this, as the functionally appears quite new)

I tried the pathauto with token modules. I got a lot of URLs that confused me past my threshold of immediate understanding. LOL So, I removed the pathauto and reconfigured my aliases. I'm not saying it isn't a good way to do things. I've only done Drupal for one week, so I'm cautious about things.

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I really like reading the part where you said, "In our experience a well designed drupal website will perform as well as a well designed static website (and is a lot easier to maintain); whereas the same definitely can't be said for a number of other solutions such as mambo / joomla out there."

I've got several static HTML sites, Joomla, Xoops,etc. that I built and now maintain. I like the CMS type sites, because I can in most cases teach the site owner how to maintain the sites and all I do is watch to make sure security updates are taken care of promptly. I don't expect the site owners to do much more than keep current content on their sites.

Thank you for your response