Drupal, along with a decent CSS based theme, makes it much easier to build and maintain a well optimized site which Search engines can read with the greatest of ease.
That’s one of the jealously guarded "secrets" of the SEO elites. Basically, just take the viewpoint of the search engine or a blind person. Is it easy to figure out what is going on without scripting, Flash or images? A good CMS handles that part for you, allowing you to concentrate on the content rather than the framework.
Duplicate content
One problem shared by many sites is that the search engine finds the same content on more than one page. Where should it send clicks? At best you are diluting your ranking by 50%, and some engines appear to penalize you more than that.
By default, all Drupal sites with "clean urls"have this problem on every page. Both http://example.com/node/21 and http://example.com/info could resolve to exactly the same page if one was a Drupal "alias" for the other.
How to fix dupes
You can get around this problem by manually adding in entries in your .htaccess file, as explained on Blamcast, but I find it much more convenient and easy to maintain if I simply use the small and fast Global Redirect module.
This little beauty handles 301 redirects (the kind Search Engines like), removing trailing slashes, redirects direct calls to /node/xx to the alias for that node, and home page redirects. Nice, simple, indispensable.
[tags]seo,drupal[/tags]
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About Bruce Kroeze
I’m wondering if this really is an issue: if all your “/node/xxxx” are converted to clean URLs, and if the “node/xxxx” is never exposed (by linking directly from one of the other pages), the search engines will never pick it up, do they? If that is indeed the case, there is no danger of being found guilty of duplicate content.
O.t.o.h. a story e.g. might appear under different paths due to assigning different categories to it. That might be a problem…
Actually, it is an issue. Without the redirect module, both node/xxx and the clean url will resolve. Hence duplicates.
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