Drupal and Canonical Urls

In Google each unique URL is indexed as a separate page. So if we have a URL: http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1 and http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1?page=3 will be indexed as separate URLs! This is a disadvantage as Google thinks we are trying to duplicate content and have multiple URLs to the same HTML content.

This is reflected in the Google Webmaster, under Diagnostics - HTML suggestions. In the webmaster HTML suggestions google points out that URL: http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1, http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1?page=3 have the same title tag. Each URL in our site should have a unique title tag.

To address this we can add a meta information in our page headers to inform Google that our main parent URL is http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1, and all clicks to any other '?page links' to be added to the parent URL. This is done by using Google's Canonical meta tags, refer:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

The Canonical meta information on our http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1?page=3  page should be: href="http://www.mysite.com/my-page-1" rel="canonical" inside link Tag.

It's not sufficient to enable Clean URL and Path auto, Global redirect modules. We must also configure our comments, View pagination, Page pagination, Auto title CCKs to have appropriate Canonical URLs to avoid getting penalized for Duplicate content and improve our site ranking.

Canonical URL integration is available in Drupal 6.0 Meta module. In Drupal 5.x there is no ready made integration. You can embed a small piece of code in the template file to achieve the same.

Checkout Newspapers in Googles fast flip!

While the newpaper industry workd wide is struggling, Google comes up with yet another innovation! The google fast flip is a truely interesting way to read news!! Try it out at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/read-news-fast-with-google-fast-flip.html

Three compelling reasons to choose Subdomains over Subsites

1. Branding – each subsite has contextually different content - distinct products
2. The use of subsites increases relevance and hence the search ability of content with in the subsite.
3. Each subsite will eventually have it’s own full featured content and community

Examples of subdomains: (subdomain and separate domains are the same)

MONSTER.COM

http://www.monsterindia.com/
http://company.monsterindia.com/index.html
http://jobsearch.monsterindia.com/searchresult.html?loc=87

P&G

http://www.pgeverydaysolutions.com/pgeds/en_US/jsp/EDS_Page.jsp?pageID=HP
http://www.pg.com/en_US/index.shtml

YAHOO

http://cricket.yahoo.com/
http://in.yahoo.com/?p=us
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://new.music.yahoo.com/

GOOGLE

http://news.google.com
http://maps.google.com

References:

From the SEO GURU:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

http://www.googlelady.com/106/folders-vs-subdomains/
http://www.searchviews.com/index.php/archives/2008/07/seo-why-microsites-are-weakening-your-seo-results-%E2%80%93-dr-naveel-builds-your-immunity.php

Google Search

Drupal sites works towards SMM - Facebook and Drupal

First and foremost, what is SMM?

Social media marketing is a set of online marketing techniques that leverage social media.

In India two very active Social Media website are Facebook and Orkut.

There has been many ways in which a Drupal site can talk to Facebook and Facebook to Drupal.

Drupal for Facebook, is a set of modules that turns Drupal into a platform for developing Facebook Applications.

Try a Demo at: http://apps.facebook.com/drupalforfacebook/, http://www.drupalforfacebook.org/sponsorship

Facebook Connect provides for Facebook users to login to the Drupal site using their Facebook login.

Some other interesting references:
Drupal for facebook - Handbook page
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect
http://www.eshilon.com/eshilon-design-blog, blog from the maintainers of facebook connect.
Drupal groups for Facebook-API
http://drupal.org/node/291525

YouTube API and Drupal

It would be great to have the YouTube API integrated with Drupal. The requirements would be to let user on our site to directly upload video and PlayVideo on to YouTube from our very own site.

What are the YouTube APIs and Tools?


For more exiting stuff with YouTubeAPI on your own site:
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html http://www.youtube.com/youtubeonyoursite#

Drupal and YouTubeAPI integration is underway. We need to have PHP 5 to enable the same. Visit http://drupal.org/project/youtube_api

Understanding Content Architecture to Google enable a site.

This is a very interesting area. Understanding the Site's content architecture to Google enable a site!!

The SUMMARY is:

1. Understand the various source of content
2. The amount of content available
3. Frequency of content update
   
4. The importance of the content
5. The relevance
6. What users can get from our Websites content?

I look forward to summarizing the same for Newspaper sites! and Especially for Drupal sites!!

Drupal in Newspapers

Drupal and SEO