I'd love to be able to specify that for certain vocabularies, nodes should publish not just the exact terms as keywords, but also all the parent terms as well. For example, I'm building a site with a pretty huge topic vocabulary, that's heavily nested. As one small example, say you've got this little subtree of the vocabulary:

History
-- U.S. Imperialism
---- WWI
---- WWII
---- Vietnam

If a node is marked with this "Vietnam" term, it'd be great if the keywords included "Vietnam,U.S. Imperialism, History", not just "Vietnam".

As a simple first step, there could be a single "Include parent terms" checkbox that applied to all vocabularies on the site. If it needed to be more complicated, we'd have to replace the existing "Auto-keywords vocabularies" multi-select with something like a little table of all the vocabularies on the site, with columns of checkboxes for "Auto-keywords", "Include parent terms", etc.

In terms of the underlying implementation, should be pretty trivial with an optional call to taxonomy_get_parents() inside nodewords_keywords_prepare().

Is there support from the maintainers to include this functionality "upstream", and if so, do you have any preference on the UI or implementation I've sketched out here? If you're basically happy with the concepts, I'll gladly produce a patch for this, since I'm definitely going to need it on my site, and I suspect it would be useful for many other sites, as well. Please let me know what you think, and I'll assign this to myself and produce a patch.

Thanks!
-Derek

p.s. Although the title sounds similar #172548: Parent taxonomy seems like it's about something else completely (though I'll admit I can't fully parse that request, so I'm not positive).

Comments

summit’s picture

Subscribing, +1 for this feature!!
greetings,
Martijn

dww’s picture

Actually, since I thought about this and submitted the issue, I've found a number of articles on the web that argue that the meta keywords tag is all but useless these days. It appears that almost no search engines still use it for anything. For example:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931
http://www.searchengineguide.com/richard-ball/meta-keywords-a.php
http://www.searchengineguide.com/jill-whalen/no-meta-keyword-tags.php
...

Not sure I care enough anymore to work on this feature. ;) Unless someone can come up with a convincing argument that the meta keywords tag is actually relevant for anything anymore, I'd be happy to "won't fix" this.

summit’s picture

Hi,
This in not quite true. Google uses the meta tags to define if a page is unique. And uses the meta tags to show on the google.com search pages.
If two pages are exactly the same, this is of course not ok, but when the meta tags differs, google considers the page as a different page.
This is what I have seen, heard about this issue.
Please tell me if I am wrong with good examples to convince me :)

greetings,
Martijn

dww’s picture

All I know about SEO is 2nd hand, what I've cobbled together from various articles online, or legend/myth. ;) I'd rather someone who really knew what they were talking about (and has evidence to back it up) said something definitive about the usefulness of meta keywords in the current search engine climate. If you've got a link to a (published in the last year or two) article describing how Google uses meta keywords to at least determine page uniqueness, I'd certainly give it a read and reconsider.

I don't think what I described would be hard, and I'm still willing to do it, provided that meta keywords are still worth spending any time on at all. ;)

summit’s picture

I do SEO-optimization as a semi-professional job with a partner and have set up together with customers good ranking sites. We have seen that meta-tags are valid to get the pages in the google index. Pages with the same meta-tag have more difficulty to get into the index.
It is of course one of the factors to consider, also other factors are important, and pages who are almost the same, should not be given to google-bot, page-uniqueness is important.
But we consider meta-tags important for the amount of pages in the index, and for general SEO, not specific.
Please other gues into SEO do you see it the same?

EDIT: See this issue for another guys opinion about this:
http://drupal.org/node/36726#comment-879457

greetings,
Martijn

Robrecht Jacques’s picture

Status: Active » Fixed

Original feature request implemented. Will be included in next release of nodewords (5.x-1.10) released later today.

About the usefulness of KEYWORDS for SEO: I'm not an expert. I would appreciate any feedback about this issue, eg a good explanation of how to use KEYWORDS and the relation to search engines such as Google and others. If someone can point me to such a document, I'd gladly add it to the project page and README.txt.

Setting as "fixed" (original feature request).

dww’s picture

Cool, thanks. ;)

Anonymous’s picture

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.