What makes drupal different in terms of SEO than f.i. Joomla wit SEF URL component ??

Posted by gdev on March 14, 2006 at 3:44pm

Hey everyone ...

The reason that I am checking out drupal is because I have read many many times that drupal is very SE friendly ... I also have read that Joomla for instanc is not .

Now, I know that there are SEF modules / components for Joomla wich should make the URLs SE friendly. Drupal seem to have this coming 'out of the box'...

My question then is ... Since one can make joomla's URL's SE friendly too, in the end, what would the difference be in regards of SEO friendlyness between the two ?? They both do SEF url's ?

Hope anyone can clarify this for me ...

Gdev..

Comments

There are lots of things

Posted by robertDouglass on March 14, 2006 at 3:54pm

I have no idea how this compares to Joomla, but some of the reasons Drupal is pretty SEO friendly include:

Drupal has a permalink for every post (it is the title of the post)
The title of the post ususally plays a role in the <title> tag in the HTML header, which search engines like.
Many Drupal themes are pretty good for content ordering, though few or none are perfect when it comes to content first HTML
There are contrib modules like Node (key) words, RobotsTxt and Page title that help further with SEO.

- Robert Douglass

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content first

Posted by sime on March 14, 2006 at 4:11pm

Many Drupal themes are pretty good for content ordering, though few or none are perfect when it comes to content first HTML

Is there anything stopping a tight "content first" theme with Drupal? Having now looked at a few page.tpl.php files it all seems quite doable.

Content First

Posted by djpappas on March 14, 2006 at 5:14pm

is very much a possiblity. I've put together a rough version of the "One True Layout" (See Position is Everything) and have had very few issues. The only issues I've ever had were on the administrative side. The engine itself is not the issue. You can structure your markup and build the css to get a SEO friendly as well as user friendly site.

Update: I meant to include the link to the referenced web page here http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/onetruelayout/
(I consider it pretty much an ideal layout unless you've got a lot of images you want to embed or the need for pixel precision layouts)

Joomla does need quite a lot

Posted by drupalancers on April 1, 2006 at 5:14pm

Joomla does need quite a lot of work compared to Drupal to make it SE friendly, although with the addition of the SEF and metadata components plus a template that uses a lot of CSS, it can come close to Drupal.

www.Drupalancers.com. Custom-Made Drupal Themes, Modules, Blocks and Websites.

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icing on the cake

Posted by sime on April 1, 2006 at 5:34pm

Since my previous post, I tried my second Drupal design. I went for gold and I took a page.tpl.php and I stripped out all the local markup and put plain divs around each piece of output.

It was damn fine. No broken tables or tags. Validated pretty well. For me, this is gold, when I get a design from a client, say a psd or some other image, I have to create a layout that matches that design. I've now reached the point where Drupal has given me everything I hoped for. (The rest is proving to be extremely rich icing on the cake.)

good article

Posted by sime on April 1, 2006 at 5:41pm

I had not read that positionisevery article, it's quite good. I like the 3rd footnote. So far for me, semantic layout hasn't been too hard.

I am starting to see however, with Drupal-like sites, that there is the potential for a million blocks of differing importance, and these types of layout techniques are crucial.

OpenSEF for Joomla

Posted by yaph on June 26, 2006 at 7:54pm

The OpenSEF component for Joomla can produce friendly URLs and offers quite a few other features for SEO. One of the problems is that it does not work with all available extensions or the extensions do not work with OpenSEF. Another problem with Joomla is that the core and many extensions bloat the output with tables and partially deprecated markup. But anyway you can achieve a search engine friendly site with Joomla but Drupal is better suited for that purpose.

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