By JimK on

Just another confirmation of how much Google likes Drupal based sites. When I made another static site a couple years ago, even with paid "site submission" services, it took about 6 months for the site to show up in any reasonable way on searches. Three months to show up at all.
On my Drupal site, the site was showing up on Google within a couple weeks, with only a few links from other sites to help. Once I added Google Sitemap module and Autopath, the site is quickly up near the top of the list on related term searchs. Google likes Drupal!

Comments

ShavenYak’s picture

ShavenYak commented

Yep, I just did some quick checking with Google, and found that one of my sites (woozie.shavenyak.net) that I just re-built with Drupal is now the #9 result on Google when someone searches for "asteroids deluxe", #5 result for "astro invader", and #1 result for "aero city". I think these are significantly better results than when it was static HTML.

I'm actually kind of embarassed, because my site really isn't the best place for someone looking for detailed information on these games!

fletcherson’s picture

fletcherson commented

Where can I find Autopath for Drupal 4.6.3?

ergophobe’s picture

ergophobe commented

He (or she) mean Pathauto I presume

http://drupal.org/node/17345

And I can't see why it would make any difference whether pathauto is installed or not, per se, so long as you have good navigation that allows the SEs to find your pages without too many hops.

iraszl’s picture

iraszl commented

I have excellent ranking on my Drupal sites. Drupal is very well optimized for Google especially with the Google Sitemap module.

Autopath doesn't help much for google, but does wonders for yahoo and msn search.

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http://raszl.net

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

To gain Google's affection. I've had Drupal up for a month, been indexed daily by googlebot, Yahoo's slurp and MSN. I am #1 at MSN with dozens of pages listed. I have a handful of pages (although a bit stale) on Yahoo. Google? They don't even know my site exists ("site:wifireporter.com" results in just a blank stare.) I know Google ranking depends on link popularity, but the search engine should at least know a site *exists*.

Ironically, Google will list my ancient blogger.com site.

We've tried all the usual: index links, links to sitemaps, sitemaps submitted to Google, referring links from *heavily* trafficked and indexed sites -- all to no avail. I'm seriously considering switching to another CMS if this situation doesn't improve.

Ed

Wi-Fi Report

ergophobe’s picture

ergophobe commented

Honestly, I don't think this has anything to do with drupal.

I put up a drupal site with pretty much the default template, just a little tiny bit of test content and put a link to it on a busy site, got crawled and had it listed in Google, MSN and Yahoo! right away.

If I have a complaint it is that Google and MSN somehow have ended up indexing more pages than I have (70 and 89 respectively), making me afraid that various ways to access (clean URLs and default, for example) have somehow gotten in there and I could end up with a duplicate content penalty eventually. I haven't looked into it because first I need to find time to get some articles and photo galleries on there, then I'll worry about whether or not the SEs can find them and how they get indexed.

In any case, the site isn't really even ready for public viewing and Google and MSN have gone nuts, indexing pages that I didn't know existed, and I'll need to fix that with robots.txt I think.

I should say, this is just a template. There's not really even any serious content on there yet (one test page and a photo gallery with about 40 photos, for a total of about 50 pages if you count navigation) and I don't even have the template worked out to my satisfaction yet. There is absolutely no SEO done on this site. It's just a hobby site with my pictures of Yosemite hiking and climbing. Try this search in the SEs and see what I mean:
site:yosemiteexplorer.com conness

Anyway, I have not previously given out the URL b/c I wanted to wait until it was ready for public viewing, but I just had to counter your assertions.

I'm really sorry for your bad luck and I am baffled by it. But blaming Drupal just doesn't jive with my experience at all.

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

I don't blame Drupal. Everyone is just a bit baffled. The Drupal community has been wonderful trying to debug the situation. The site is known -- its being regularly indexed -- but not listed by the major search engine. We had a month-long online debugging session (a href="http://drupal.org/node/36375") here trying to find what might be missing and we all left scratching our chins. The page is formatted correctly, the paths are correct, everything is as should be -- still no joy.

Ed

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iraszl’s picture

iraszl commented

Results will start showing in google after 2 month. At the moment your site is still in the sandbox. It's not a bug, it's a feature. :) Seriously, don't overdo submitting your site, just be patient. Each feature will show up slowly. site:domain after like 8 weeks, link:domain after like 12 weeks, etc. Your images will only show after 6 month or more in google images.

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http://raszl.net

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

I'll try. I've only submitted my site to the top 3 search engines, plus regularly submit an updated sitemap to Google. Other than that, the only other submitting I've done is to other news sites, as well as consumer-oriented wireless sites.

I first submitted my site in early October; that means the site:domain search should appear later this month. Thanks for the words of encouragement. I don't mind waiting, so long as I know I've done everything possible to attract the search engines.

Ed

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UserFriendly’s picture

UserFriendly commented

Have you used the Google Sitemap module? Did you submit the sitemap using a Google account? Have you had Google verify your sitemap (involves uploading a file with a specific filename to your site)?

Richard

gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

My site got a PageRank 6 in under 2 months!

Drupal rocks!!

--
On a more serious note:

1. Add your site to as many high pr sites as possible
2. Add links to other popular sites
3. Add links to Googles sites (blogger, etc)
4. Submit Sitemap on google's site
5. visit http://www.pingomatic.com
6. update regularly
7. Get Adsense
8. if you're not using clean urls, make sure every page has a link to it.
9. Your whole site should be accessible with a minimum number of clicks. [Mine is currently 2 clicks, excluding the gallery]
[use nodelist module for number 9 on the frontpage]

thats exactly what I did.
--

-Gautam
--
http://www.ahste.com

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

I've done steps 1 and 4-9. The sitemap is submitted, updated and retrieved almost hourly. The content is massively refreshed (it's a news site, after all.) I use pingomatic and am part of the Adsense (as well as other advertising programs.) I've turned on clean URLs and have text links to every page.

What was interested was your advice on adding links to popular sites and Google sites. I thought Google determined a site's ranking by it popularity -- ie, the number of sites which link to your site. Either way, I'll try linking to Google content and see if that makes a difference.

Ed

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gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

I meant add you own links to popular sites, google sites... :)

sorry about that..

--
but speaking about adding external links to your own sites:
Yes, your pagerank does depend on who you link to. If you link to popular sites and make sure you stay out of bad neighbourhoods, google will like your page better.
--

I'm still clueless why your pages are still not available on google...

-Gautam
--
http://www.ahste.com

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

Used the Google Sitemap module (Google downloads the sitemap often during the day) and submitted the sitemap to Google. The sitemap has been verified.

Ed

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UserFriendly’s picture

UserFriendly commented

You could try fixing your validation errors. Not saying it would solve your problem, but it may help and it's a good idea anyway.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.wifireporter.com/

Search engine bots will do their best to understand non-valid code, but it's probably much easier for them to index your pages if they get what they expect.

If you need assistance fixing these errors I'm sure people will be willing to help.

Richard

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

There are quiet a few. How do I know which are serious enough to give Google a problem and which are simply nit-picking?

Ed

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Maniac8888’s picture

Maniac8888 commented

Most validation errors (especially with a CMS site) are due to 404-page not found errors. These are a fact of life in a highly dynamic content site. Google does not have a problem with this (it is always a good idea to serve up a page for 404 errors). Google will have problems if the crawler continually accesses a site that does not have content. On an average day, we have maybe 200 or so 404's as the sitemap shows pages that have been deleted. We still have another 500 or so pages indexed like clockwork. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

BTW, everything being equal (same content, same URL, same domain, same tools (i.e. sitemap)), Drupal is not any better or worse for Google than any other method for posting content.

iraszl’s picture

iraszl commented

Most of the bugs are not affecting your google ranking, but one. Your links show the PHP session id's. This creates unnecessarily long urls. If you're on Dreamhost I got the fix for it.

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http://raszl.net

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

I thought I fixed those by editing my .htaccess file thusly:


php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
php_value register_globals 0
php_value session.auto_start 0
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0


php_value magic_quotes_gpc 0
php_value register_globals 0
php_value session.auto_start 0
php_value session.use_only_cookies 1
php_value session.use_trans_sid 0

Bluesoft is my webhost.

Ed

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gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

I was just browsing your site and none of the index pages seem to be working.. you might want to look into that...

-Gautam
--
http://www.ahste.com

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

I checked. Odd. The index pages work as a registered user, but not for anonymous users. (I have the privilages set so both classes of users can access the index pages.) Anonymous users get some SQL error about a missing table (na), but the indexpage archive has no mention of what sort of tables are needed.

Ed

Wi-Fi Living

gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

The Node List module, suits your purpose better. [This doesnt even need any database tables and is very easy to install.]

-Gautam
--
http://www.ahste.com

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

Thanks. I've renabled nodelists and they now work from the anonymous user account.

Ed

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Geary’s picture

Geary commented

That's not the good PHPSESSID patch. This is.

heine’s picture

heine commented

This might also be interesting (from Matt Cutts Blog):

The timing worked out to announce a new webmaster console on Google Sitemaps. I signed up today and it’s pretty sweet. For example, you can now see crawl errors, timeouts on pages, robots.txt errors, unreachable urls, etc. Just really useful hard data that tells you if you have crawl problems and what they are. And you do not need a sitemap to use this functionality. You just create an empty file to verify that you own the domain. Check it out.

--
Tips for posting to the forums

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

Information. Although my sitemap is verified and was last checked this morning, the system repeatedly said it had no information about my site -- no page information, no crawler information and no errors. Another chin-scratcher.

Ed

Wi-Fi Living

Marco Palmero’s picture

Marco Palmero commented

I agree... I was surprised at how fast my site got listed and got to the top of some search keywords...

So I guess to make your site search engine friendly using drupal:

site map
use descriptions for your taxonomy
and validate your css and your xhtml
____________________________________________________________________________
Blog - Sydney News, Current Affairs, Photography, Travelling & University...

gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

i shouldnt even be saying this but...

my site has no description for any taxonomy..
my site has tons of css/xhtml errors (which i'm just not getting time to fix, cause of some exams i have coming up)

and i get around 60 users a day, 55 of which come from search engines.. not that its a huge number.. but i got 5 people searching for an article i put up 3 days ago!! and its on the first results page.. [1st page, 4th result for "viva la raza" on google] [and its an aggregated single line post!!]

but i do have the sitemap online.. and i signed on to google sitemaps and google analytics..

sitemaps found a few errors on my site.. and has crawled it..
analytics hasnt been able to get any data from my site for the past few days.. (even though it keeps saying 'within the next 12 hours')

honestly.. i have no clue whats wrong with wi fi report!!
its one of the weirdest cases of SEO i've ever seen.. along with mine.. considering i didnt really do much quality control on my site..

drupalfan really needs some serious help..

-Gautam
--
http://www.ahste.com

ps. i do plan on fixing all the errors on my site soon.. as soon as i get some time to do so :)

iraszl’s picture

iraszl commented

It takes some time...

---
http://raszl.net

Marco Palmero’s picture

Marco Palmero commented

How old is your website gautam?

perhaps that is another factor... or oyur pr rating or the number of inbound links you have from high pr sites?

Another thing I found with the drupal logs is that I get a lot of hits from robots... should be a good sign that my site is being crawled at a regular basis

____________________________________________________________________________
Blog - Sydney News, Current Affairs, Photography, Travelling & University...

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

My site has been up since late Sept/early Oct., and still no Google referrals. (Although a couple from Yahoo.) The site is regularly crawled by half-dozen spiders. I signed up with Google's Analytics and it did find, crawl and list my site's stats: everything was crawled okay without errors. Google lists my site as low visability. I have to think it is because of the low number of sites which link to it.

Wi-Fi Living

gautam_chandna’s picture

gautam_chandna commented

I started it sometime in october, 2005..

and if you look at it, you'll notice that even I dont understand what google likes about it..

Its a simple blog site with multiple users.. (and it doesnt even completely support Internet Explorer! [yet])

-Gautam
--
http://www.ahste.com

iraszl’s picture

iraszl commented

You have your php session ids showing in urls.
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http://raszl.net

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

Can someone give me a concise, clear and easily-understood tutorial on how to stamp out PHP Session IDs? So far, I've only read confusing, muddled explanations -- all of which haven't worked in my case. Thanks.

Wi-Fi Living

Geary’s picture

Geary commented

Here is the patch that you need:

http://drupal.org/node/4109#comment-38607

You don't even need to use a patch utility if you don't have one. Just look at the patch file and it tells you what to do. In includes/common.inc there are about a dozen lines to delete, marked with "-" in the patch file. In sites/default/settings.php there is one line to add, marked with "+" in the patch file. (Don't include the + when you add the line.)

Very simple and has worked for everyone who's commented on it so far.

andre75’s picture

andre75 commented

I think Google is just getting better and faster. My static site gets updated faster too. I don't think it has anything to do with Drupal (and by all means it shouldn't). The only thing that I would credit Drupal for in this respect is that it makes the content accessible to the search engines (Google can browse the drupal manu structure).

Andre

-------------------------------------------------
http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com

ergophobe’s picture

ergophobe commented

That's just the point I was making here (showcase announcement).

Drupal is neither magic nor the kiss of death. There's no Drupal penalty, that's for sure, but it's the on-page stuff that still matters for getting indexable material in there, and of course inbound links help for rankings. As near as I can tell, Google does not care what technology you use as long as the site is spiderable and the copy clearly explains what the site is about.

I also think that G has gotten better at both spidering and at figuring out what's relevant. The days of having your Google listings consist of your navigation links are pretty mch gone. And for once and for all, clean URLs are human friendly and good design, but up to a certain point, the SEs don't care.

Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)

kylube’s picture

kylube commented

gsite map installed, plus I have a orginal name to some degree. I did one link exchange and started posting on message forums with my link in my sig. Posting on boards seems to what help it get listed so fast. I am number one when you search kylube lol.

Anyway only my index site is listed so far. Im working on tons of content for the site, so hopfully in the future the rest of my pages covering different topics will get listed.

http://www.kylube.org - Post news on my homepage

drupalfan’s picture

drupalfan commented

That's what has me stumped. The site has been indexed since late October. The sitemap is available and downloaded daily. Hundreds of posts are added daily. I have links pointing to the site from here and a couple other high-traffic sites. Still, Google reports my domain doesn't exist.

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