By londes on

I work primarily on the usability, SEO, and performance testing side of things, and recently I've had a few clients ask about Drupal in regards to SEO in particular. Can someone point me in the direction of some resources, or hopefully share your experiences regarding the pros/cons of Drupal development in this regard?

I found a few plugins that "help" with this kind of thing, but I'm looking for some insight on a more fundamental level. In other words, structurally, load time, code validation, etc. How easy is it to customize to ensure everything is spidered properly and productive code changes can be made?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x, Drupal 8.x

Comments

John_B’s picture

John_B commented

Drupal people will of claim Drupal is great, but that does not go far. Looking at specifics, I am not sure what you mean by "structurally", whether you mean the page or the site. In terms of page structure it is pretty good but depending on the theme design you can end up with h1 tags for both site title and one or multiple node or block items, which is something you might want to be careful about. Also the markup can include a lot of redundant divs -- check out the Mothership theme for a solution. Code on the whole tends to be valid. Like everything in Drupal the tools are there to make a website do exactly what you want (the tools being the core architecture with its well-documented and powerful APIs as well as some high quality contributed modules). Therefore Drupal is great if you want a fair amount of customisation and if you have the time and skills to implement it. I think this applies to SEO as to everything else when using Drupal. Page load speed - often a problem if you are a low budget user. If you set things up right, and are prepared to invest a bit of time and effort and skill on hosting, Drupal is just fine.

For an out-of-the box setup, my feeling is 'SEO is pretty good good but maybe room for improvement.' If you have time and budget for customisation and if you want a customised 'hand-built' site (bearing in mind that generally good Drupal people are not particularly cheap, and poor quality work on Drupal can screw things up really badly), Drupal has to be the best choice, or at least one of them, for most use cases.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors