Search Engine Placement on an Established Site moving to Drupal

kellyllek - October 6, 2009 - 13:21

If I switch an old site over to Drupal, anyone know how it will affect search engine placement? Currently the site appears high in engines because it's an established business and it's been around a long time (10+ years). I would like to minimize issues when making the change. Is there a process involved? Like should I keep all the same old metatags in place somehow? I know in the long run Drupal will provide better SEO, but the site in question is consistently on the top in it's industry and I'd like it to stay there.

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I don't think there's a lot

dman - October 6, 2009 - 14:12

I don't think there's a lot specific to Drupal that would be any different to migrating from or to any other framework.
You can (and should) support old URLs in several ways.
Simplest is by just giving the content the old paths, with or without the old suffixes.
You are allowed to have more than one alias for the same content, so if you are doing a little restructuring you can have both old and new URLs
If you really care about SEO, then you want to look into global_redirect and a few others that are designed to forward old URLs to new friendly ones using 301 redirects with all their search weight.

As far as metatags go, they are supported if you use the 'nodewords' module.

How you TRANSFER the old content consistently is up to you. My project is Import HTML which may help, depending on what your source it like. There is CVS import as well, but if your old site is a bit crusty, you may be best to just get someone to sit down and copy+paste for a day or two.

.dan.