Optimizing Drupal For Google Search

Note: This guide assumes at least a basic knowledge of Drupal, including module installation. If you run into trouble, read through the Drupal Tutorial.

It may not be as popular as WordPress, but you’ll nevertheless find plenty of website owners who swear religiously by Drupal. It’s not hard to see why, really. There’s a lot to love about it.

It’s an incredibly secure platform and frequently updated besides. Drupal’s also easy to customize, with a bevy of both free and premium plugins available to webmasters and an intuitive web interface that makes it ideally suited to manage a large volume of content. Last but certainly not least, it’s extremely powerful from an SEO standpoint.

“Many SEO experts agree that Drupal is the ideal platform for developing search-friendly websites,” writes Udemy’s Nick Gibson. “Thanks to Drupal’s huge community of developers, there are plenty of plug-ins available that make optimizing your website for search simple.”

He’s not wrong. There may well be more SEO-geared plugins for Drupal than for any other platform(WordPress included), and most of them are quite well-made. Of course, plugins alone won’t get your PageRank up. To truly succeed, you’re also going to need a solid understanding of SEO.

That’s why we’re here.

Now, the basic rules of search engine optimization – the same ones we covered in our SEO guide – all apply to Drupal as they would any content management system. That means you’re still going to need to do keyword research. You’re still going to want to make sure your page loads quickly and has a decent layout. And last but certainly not least, you’re still going to need to tweak your site’s names, titles, headings, meta tags, and urls.

With all that in mind, there are a few additional steps a savvy webmaster needs to take if they’re going to fully optimize their Drupal installation.

Setting Up Your Drupal Sitemap

First thing’s first, you’re going to want to set up a sitemap so that your website’s easier to crawl – a fairly involved process in and of itself. The fastest way to go about doing this, according to icanlocalize, is to download the XML Sitemap module. Install it just as you would an ordinary module, then navigate to the Configuration Page.

Now, you probably aren’t going to be changing a whole lot here. Familiarize yourself with the different options in the event that you need to tweak one of them, and change whatever you see fit. Once you’re satisfied with your site configuration, your next step is to run Cron – navigate to your Drupal URL with /cron.php tacked on to the end, and leave it to run until the page stops loading. This will populate the XML sitemap for you.

Finally, once you’ve finished all of this, all you need to do is submit your Sitemap to Google.

Modifying Your Site’s Robots.txt

There’s one more step you might consider, in addition to populating a sitemap and carrying out on-page optimization: editing your site’s Robots.txt. Although the basic Robots.txt file provided by Drupal is quite passable, there are a few tweaks you could implement in order to further optimize things. You can find the file at /robots.txt, at which point it can be opened in your command line editor.

icanlocalize gives a few examples of the changes you could potentially make here. Let’s say, for example, your website’s extremely fast – you might consider changing the Crawl-delay value to five seconds. If you’re running a website that allows for user-uploaded content, you could add the Disallow line to prevent a particular file type or directory from showing up in search. Last but certainly not least, the Bad-Robot User-agent could be used to get back at content scrapers.

There are plenty of other modifications you could make, mind you. Documentation with a more complete list of commands and functions can be found here. Make sure you create a backup before modifying anything.

A List Of Awesome SEO Plugins

We’ll wrap things up with links to some of the best SEO plugins ever developed for Drupal. Installing these in addition to all the other advice given here can give your website exactly the boost it needs to rank and draw in a torrent of new visitors. Have a look at a few of our recommendations:

In Closing

Although Drupal might not be the most popular content management system on the web, you’ll nevertheless find plenty of webmasters who swear by it. It’s easy to understand why. It’s one of the most powerful platforms in the world, with a bevy of awesome features that make it ideally-suited for search engine optimization.

Features which you now fully understand how to utilize.