By danielvianna on

at our company we are discussing the pros and cons about implementing CMS.
Comparing Drupal to wordpress my co-worker (who is not a developer) told me that Drupal is not SEO friendly. Is this true?

He told me this:

Search Engine Optimization and Google-Love:
• In this case, Wordpress is the better CMS for our site because it outputs less code. Drupal has so much extraneous code attached to its pages that Google takes a second look at websites with our traffic ranking. Not a good idea in any case. Drupal is going to add a ton more code that is also going to slow down our pages’ loading speed.

• We don’t really have much overhead attached to search engine optimization with Wordpress – we don’t have much work that needs to be done with the implementation of Wordpress, but with Drupal, we’re going to have a lot more money spent on coding Drupal to our liking. Wordpress is already SEO-friendly

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

There's so much misinformation about seo floating around it's almost absurd. I've no clue where you got your info, but drupal has great seo. drupal.org is a perfect example-- it has insane google juice with very little tweaking of anything seo wise. Moreover, drupal has seo friendly URLs as part of core and easily enhanced with the pathauto and token modules to automate. There's also the nodewords and seo_checklist modules as well.

Ultimately, other than a very few architectural best practices (like friendly urls), SEO is a matter of having lots of fresh relevant content. I wish everyone would stop spending so much time on architecting artificial seo-- it's turned the internet into a wasteland of spam and useless advertisements even google can't circumvent (or perhaps doesn't want to).

</rant> :-(

jbomb’s picture

jbomb commented

I would suggest that "SEO friendly" is more of a condition of the content than the system that is used to enter it. Both systems can be completely customized, so neither is "better" than the other in that regard.

There are some that feel that wordpress has a more "designer-friendly" presentation layer, but I don't share that opinion. There are a number of comparison articles out there, but I'll offer the following: http://www.searchreadyseo.com/blog/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal/

[edit:]

You might also have a look at http://www.drupalsites.net/ if you're concerned with Drupal's appearance.

john.kenney’s picture

john.kenney commented

complete bunk.

for the average user, you can do essentially identical things in both with the right settings configurations and/or modules/plug-ins. for advanced users, drupal is probably the more customizable SEO-wise just because it is more easily customizable generally.

i have sites implemented in both and for SEO purposes, they are equivalent.

the idea that, when comparing similar types of sites (e.g., blog vs. blog), drupal generates more source code is absurd. look at the source code in some sites implemented in each and you'll see there's no difference - at least when comparing essentially like sites.

on the other hand, drupal is arguably the more challenging to learn and use - not because of SEO particularly, but in general. wordpress is more pre-packaged and simpler for the average user, if out-of-the-box it does the things you need your site to do, then it would be easier than drupal. but wordpress is fundamentally a blogging platform, so if you aren't doing a blog, then you've got some extra work to do anyway to configure it and drupal will provide more flexibility in the long run.

Witch’s picture

Witch commented

I have no time to explain why drupal is seo friendly.

But you can believe what all posters said before. Drupal is realy realy seo friendly. You can do whatever you want. Its amazing and i am very happy with drupal and seo.

Ravish’s picture

Ravish commented

Drupal is SEO friendly, it has most of the things required from a SEO perspective.

I run websites on both Drupal and Wordpress. Overall, my Wordpress powered websites perform better in terms of SEO.

If you are looking for a powerful CMS, go with Drupal. If your requirements are minimal, I'll recommend Wordpress. Wordpress has a small footprint and works better with SEO for smaller websites.

If I was to build a large community website, I would go with Drupal. Drupal is very effective at organizing large amount content. It offers more customization with Website & URLs structure than Wordpress. You can do some nifty search engine optimization with the help of Books module.

It won't be wise to say X is better than Y. I can give you a better recommendation if you can tell more about your requirements.

jigneshg’s picture

jigneshg commented

I am totally agree with Ravish,

Drupal is definitely SEO friendly but if you are building small websites then wordpress is the best as you can easily customize the stuff due to plenty of free plugins.

But, if you are planning to go for large website then drupal is the best alternative.

Before selecting any CMS just check below points from SEO:

- Code to text ratio should be minimum (coding part should be minimum as compare to text).
- Keyword rich URL (manual and auto)..no URL with query string please !!
- Unique TITLE META (Auto or manual)

Apart from given points, there are lots of other small factors which need to be consider while selecting CMS.

I am sure this will help you to take the decision.

John Callaghan’s picture

John Callaghan commented

Drupal is not inherently SEO friendly, it has the potential to be SEO friendly. Whether that potential is fulfilled depends on the developers or development team, planning, budget and the spec.

Wordpress SEO can be configured in the settings and with a couple of plugins in less than half an hour.

It concerns me that stating that Drupal is SEO friendly will cause people to erroneously assume it is SEO friendly out-of-the-box.

djramix123’s picture

djramix123 commented

There is actually a great article addressing this issue.

http://www.commonplaces.com/blog/drupal-seo-friendly

Hope I helped.