September 3, 2010

Avoiding the dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty in Drupal

droplet branch Avoiding the dreaded Duplicate Content Penalty in DrupalDrupal, 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.

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Tricky Drupal Javascript Loading Problem

drop Tricky Drupal Javascript Loading ProblemA short tale about squashing a bug.

You see, my mistrust for IE made me miss the real problem. What was happening was that in IE 7 on Vista, a site I’m building for a client was not loading any Javascript. It wasn’t even loading the base Javascript "jquery.js" and "drupal.js", so my site theme Javascript wasn’t working at all.

I dug in and began tracing code using my typical technique of embedding "drupal_set_message()" calls in the suspect areas. Sure enough, no Javascript was getting loaded, but only when I used my IE test machine.

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Taxonomy Theme, how I love thee

Love itI’m building a new Drupal 5 site for a client, and I was dreading the hack-work I was going to have to do to make it look like what the designer had come up with. There are at least five distinct page templates in the crazy thing!

I love working with a designer, since then I don’t have to make all the choices, but sometimes it can lead to tons of work. It certainly has in this case. Most Drupal sites have just one template for a reason, but this one needed several, and they also needed to be maintainable and assignable after I was gone from the picture.

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