Category Archives: search engines

Top 10 Drupal modules

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1. Askimet – how can you build a site, with a possibility for users to leave comments and not to have this plugin ? There are thousands of spam bots around, leaving hundreds of stupid and sometimes offensive comments wherever they can. Askimet is a perfect plugin to stop them from doing it on your Drupal site. Originally created for Wordpres, the Askimet is absolutely essential for any community-driven site.

2. Category – allows you to structure your site and to organize content with categories, which is quite useful as for SEO. Categories and containers can be created as nodes and the content can be assigned to the categories. The category module will improve your site navigation vastly, turning it into more tree-like hierarchy.

3. XML Sitemap – generate dynamic sitemap for keeping search engines well informed about the changes in your site structure. At the moment of writing only Google and Yahoo providing the services for using this information directly, while MSN is already working on a similar solution, they have already announced about joining the sitemaps standard. For any webmaster this is a must have module.

4. Nodewords – which is also known as “Meta Tags”, a module which gives you control over meta tags and their content. I have seen a lot of Drupal-based sites completely free of meta information. From the site description to keywords and Geo tags, all that is to be controlled by the Nodewords. A good site may not have an empty <head> section =O)

5. Page Title – lets you customize every page title the way you wish. It is a very important factor for SEO and even if you do not care much about it, altering page title conforming the content you providing is so important for usability. A lot of times, the title of the page is not _exactly_ the same title that you are using for your heading, for example when providing a bigger view over the content of the page, you might choose to skip some of the words while adding others – for all those purposes and even more, i need “Page Title” module for every Drupal installation.

6. Path Redirect – Imagine, that you are moving some of your pages from one location to another. All the links that the search engines have indexed, and your partners have placed on your site are going to be destroyed, if you won’t do something about it. You can ask all the sites that are linking to you, to alter their links, but first – it will take some time and second – some of them won’t be available to do that; and what will you do about the search engines, waiting for Google or Yahoo to reindex your links will take some very serious time, and in the mean time, your potential users and customers will be hardly disappointed. Path Redirect solves this problem.

7. Views no modern Drupal site is created without this module. This module is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. The views module can give you the flexibility, that for example elder versions of Drupal were completely incapable of doing. If you want to sort your content differently, if you need to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type or if you require to provide ‘unread forum posts’. A lot of different modern Drupal modules also depends on the Views module.

8. Update Status – if you wish to have version control of your modules, then this is the best way of doing it. Update Status can automatically check new versions of installed modules and notify you at the administration panel right after you log in. Having a lot of modules on the Drupal installation will oblige you checking the updates very regularly, and that means visiting dozens of pages every couple of weeks, which is not a big fun. Update Status was created exactly to help resolving this problem. This module is only available for versions starting with Drupal 5.

9. TinyMCE – is the module that you probably can’t live without. Having anyone responsible for the content, who does not understand XHTML will be a disaster without this module, and in so many cases, the people don’t have an idea of what XHTML is. I believe it is a shame, that Drupal does not have a default editor for the image uploading, it’s hard to find any CMS which does not have this functionality. TinyMCE will solve all problems with images inserting by providing nice usable interface. One word of caution – consult this TinyMCE compatibility chart before you really starting using

10. PathAuto – is a module for generating automatically the path aliases for all possible types of content. When having a lot of content appearing almost every day then no one will be able to invent new url for every content post. The PathAuto module handles these cases, generating path aliases based on the content of the page.

There are some other modules worth mentioning, but they all depend on the implemented project, but may become quite popular with the time, such as Adsense, Flash Video (until the new <video> tag is not available in HTML, its a nice way to have videos), Video module (is an alternative), Events (a lot of communities have events =O)), Pdf View (there are so many times things that you might need in PDF format),

Spam vs Meta

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No one is be surprised by the number of meta compilations available on the blogs all around the internet. What makes me worry is that the percentage of the information in relation to the meta spam is getting lower with every day. A friend of mine from Austria told me that he wont be surprise if one day a lot of those meta engines will disappear one day like dot com bubble has disappeared at the end of the last century. He is quite right, since all meta information providers do not have a real value behind them, besides being a servants, and we have a very big and a powerful one – Google, who already occupies this space.

I was just thinking, that in order to gain hundreds or thousands of users, spammers just create a new list of already existing css menus or html templates and put it somewhere on the digg or somewhere else. Then hundreds of users will “discover” it visiting and digging and dotting and whatever you prefer. It is quite disappointing, that the most bloggers in such way turn them self into spammers, or may be the truth is that they are not bloggers, but just meta spammers. I can not imagine someone working creating pages having time to check out 70 or 80 templates, and doing that in depth. This is absolutely unreasonable, because the time it takes to check out the code of the xhtml template tells me that in order to “process” them all one will need a couple of weeks, when already “behind the corner”, at the same blogs there are hundreds more templates and css technics and so on.

So, we arrive to the main question, how could someone check out 70-80 templates and post them each and every 3-4 days, my answer is – impossible, it is just a way of surfing through the pages of people, who create real content, and then collect it and put into a blog post, showing everyone, who deep and good your knowledges are. When i check blogs of really creative people, i see one or two good technical posts per month, cause it is difficult to discover something worth disclosure, but hey, meta spammers do 15 posts a month with one or two thousands references.

I guess i have reached the state of completely ignoring such posts and such posters (spammers). For me, meta posts are as good as dead, as they have no real information.

Google Zeitgeist – no results for Portugal and Austria

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I am really disappointed with Google Zeitgeist, since they continue to ignore several major european countries by not including results in the reports. Portugal, Austria, Belgium are all major european countries and they are not at the list but at the same time Greece is present (i don’t think greek economy is up to compete with austrian or belgian), so i am thinking that may be the reason for this ignorance is the population. But after checking that Czech Republic has almost the same population as Portugal or Belgium, i really see no reason at all of ignoring those countries. I do not see any sequence in including one countries and excluding other ones. Also notable is the absence of Romania, with more 22 Millions of population, surely they deserve their place at Zeitgeist.
Two local search engines that i have used for years are Google Austria and Google Portugal, and since Google shows in Zeitgeist the results of other local search engines, i think it would be easy to include Portugal and Austria as well.

From programmers point of view, there is no reason at all of not doing it. From internet marketing point of view, its a terrible situation, for webmasters being excluded for quite some time, with apparently no reason at all. For example, for me the really interesting public is the portuguese at the moment, so without data from Google Zeitgeist about most popular searches i can feel a kind of ignored.

Google sitemap links

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Finally, after much deliberation Google has finally allowed the webmasters to see which links it really indexes. As it was written today in “Discover your links” and “Google provides backlink tool for site owners” posts, Google has finally added this so much requested functionality to their Sitemaps tool. I know a couple of guys who went to register in Yahoo SiteExplorer just because Google’s link: has not worked properly for ages, and Google Sitemaps has not provided anything close to this functionality, but finally we seem to have it working. Still far from being perfect and even not reaching 80% in my opinion, but it is a major improvement.

There is an interesting fact, written twice with bold on the same page by Matt Cutts – “Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight”, and it makes a lot of sense for me, since for some of the sites i know there are quite a number of links but judging by the pagerank number – the most of them are still far from being counted. At the same time it is a kind of a protection for search engines against those who build thousands links by robot programs, because once the link carries no relation or significant connection, it should not be counted.

Now we have a possibility to trace all those who link to us, and it is a quite an important information. Of course one can always trace from which pages the visits are coming from, but there are a lot of pages, from which you wont get a click, but you might have a link, which could help you improving your pagerank at Google and final ranking in all major search engines, and in the end effect this is what all webmasters are looking for – to be at number one of the search results in all important keywords combinations.

I am looking forward of getting more information from the Google Sitemaps, especially since i can compare it with the one from Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and see which one sees which links.

Sitemap Protocol

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A few days ago Google, Microsoft and Yahoo has agreed to join forces for defining a standard for sitemaps usage based on a XML which simplificates the work of the search engine bots, by distributing available site strucutre information. Originally developed by Google and already in use since about a year by Google Sitemaps has become a standard de-facto and as a matter of a fact, the version publicated on the sitemaps.org site has a higher version(0.9) then one i am using at the moment(0.7).

It is very nice to see, that the big 3 of the search are finally agreeing on something, which will make work of the webmasters easier. This way, we wont have to implement three independent solutions for each of the search engines, and i am more then welcoming it. The only question that i have in my mind is how much time will their stick to it and keep working together, since Microsoft is known for ignoring the common standards and defining their own, but in this case, because Google is the absolute market leader all over the world, i believe, that as long as microsoft dont have market controlled, they are most probably going go stick to it.

Another interesting thing about this organization is the license, under which they are distributing this information. I confess, that this “Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License” is quite a surprise for me, especially since a rant, made a couple days ago by Mr. Ballmer about Linux and its license.