Drupal SEO Pitfalls and How To Avoid Them - brentgees

[Music] laughs stop it [Music] welcome everyone will be giving a session about Drupal SEO pitfalls and how to avoid them the session is based about things we encountered on our own websites and also during SEO audits we did this will be do a session with me and water who is joining remote and so the other pitfalls the Drupal complement extended edition so about us first a bit of me and when I'm a Drupal architect and Drupal trainer a drop solids I will speak our Drupal con unstirred am dev days Lisbon and Drupal cam against Darrelle 18 as well so about my colleague yeah it's perfect okay perfect so I'm joining from Dalton I didn't make it due to circumstances as it over but I would ask you strategist and evangelist also has also some common friends I have to speak about all things related to as you know that's why I didn't want to miss out the opportunity to comment you know yeah so during this session I will talk about a more deaf approach and what we will talk more about the as you approach maybe to annoy water a bit let's go show of hands who here is a developer ok biggest part of the people are developers and any SEO specialist or marketing people in here you have one people who is really an dressed slide builders or Drupal users I guess okay so mostly developers also some site user and one as a person okay let's get right in okay that's an exit yeah okay let's dive right so the first thing we're going to talk about is public entities so by default and this might be publicly available on their own URL so for example if you have a team module that a team member could generate public notes for each separate team member so if you have for example 20 people at the Z then it results in 20 separate pages for one team member while they are only really used for a team overview page so if the result in things you see at the bottom of the slide there / no / - or / excellent / / / 40 - so this generates notes or pages for each entity separately so this is actually low value confidence and then conference pages and these can be indexed by Google if you're not careful of your support so we don't want these pages on their sites because they are a waste of resources there are ways the bandwidth wasted our budgets and a waste of database storage among others so to recap in general you want your pages on your websites to be as valuable as possible and we have a lot of these thin content pages well that's some good for your visitor experience and it's not good for Google what it calls in access these pages so the solution to this is actually preventing pages that shouldn't be accessed by accessing imbibe is for visitors this can be done by modules such as a rabbit forum rabbit hole module when as an example Watergate you have a team page and every team member is a separate note if the page isn't designed is a themed or is meant to be accessed take away the access to that page and then it will be not indexed by Google as well next all pages should always be an entity if there is even as possible so oftentimes pages on your website will be generated based on other content and these will not be helpful note in the back ends so for example only the home page is an example of that or overview pages like we talked about earlier so when a page isn't editable other nodes there is no easy way to it's the name of that information or to configure the XML sitemap inclusion something's for this page so a compliment editor should be able to add the makeup item or the legal description and things like that and if a page is in Evernote and the content or doesn't know how to do this or he isn't able to do that there are two separate solutions for it the first one is to use the Drupal core layout builder so with the courtyard builder you can use a page which is just a node and add certain blocks it so you create your page add a view to it and then the end yeah and user can just edit the page add some meta tags not a problem since all the pages are perfectly doable for a zero for a meta tags the other solution which is the one we use more in rock-solid since we're not well hope the ad builder is very good used in the future but at the moment there are some still some problems with translations or other things so for now we actually use paragraphs for our pages and we have one paragraph that uses either the blog fields or the overview field module that's a module that allows you to create a view page or create a view block and use it in a fields in a paragraph so you add your normal basic page you add paragraphs to it and you can add an overview and added bonus of this is that the content editor can add blocks below or on top or below the overview as well so that's two packages yeah let's talk a bit about search to be more specific indexable internal search now by default internal search result pages or serves as google likes the column by defaults there are often indexable by search engines now again this results in low value and the amount of pages which can be indexed by Google so we're talking about internal search so the search functionality on your own websites are not updated so you don't want these little gravity pages indexed same reasons as before I want all your pages on your website to be of a high quality and you don't want no value of difficulty pages really call back me now who will even implicitly mention this it's all the guidelines to not let Googlebot index internal search results so yeah there are different results when you're just using views for search pages which I in previous slides sets don't use few pages use few blocks but if you're still using it or it's been using website you can install the meta tags or medevacs abuse bait and a bit like juice module and i'm in your views you can edit the meta tags and check the buttons to prevent search and next from indexing this page and present them from following links on this page so as you can see it's is possible with a view page to edit the SEO the meta tags but it's easier in a separate page so if you use separate page then you just have to install the meta tag and then it's on the right same procedure only a bit easier since it's not a meta tag and SS there's nothing new pages and when it's in view pages it's in config so your content editor can't change it so this is the advice solution just to recap our small if you're not doing this if you're not walking Google from indexing those pages then in theory your website contains an infinite amount of pages because you can search for anything I wish for all generally if you are walking from energy hits than the websites yeah a decent in fact a lot of indexable pages which is a portion of something something what okay continuing on the subject over love indexed best environments and pages now the developments and staging environments are often probable and indexable by search engines sometimes because of the configuration issues sometimes because of laziness beyond allow this that's actually well that rarely comes up like you're a effects is also something that often shows up in search results now I think everybody can agree that we don't want staging or violence or testing pages like our graph testing pages to be in the Google index or to even be publicly available for that matter now there are a wide range of reasons for this for example apart from SEO you don't want people searching for your sites coming up our staging websites and ordering something from a staging workshop for example these are all things that can and will happen if you don't look out for them now I add some screenshots here from real websites really girls that are in the Google index so as you can see here there are some definite taking environments here there are some more recent text appearing on the right-hand side I see a webshop it seems some these are all things to look out for people who start shopping on your staging environment of course solution there are two solutions if it's if you have a desk page in your live environment it's more difficult to deny access from it so the solution again is with the meta tag module just check the checkbox prevent search engine search engines from indexing this page that's one solution for live environments and for staging you might think the solution is robots the txt but what we'll cover why it's not the solution later in this presentation the best solution is actually preventing access to the page with HT passwords so if you want to set it up you can go look pretty quickly it's pretty easy to set up and the client would have to enter a username and a password and before they can access the devastating environments this will make sure Hulu can access the page characteristics so that's what you want next up let's talk about assets being blocked by the robots.txt file no sometimes public alert images or other website assets will be located inside a folder that's blocked for callers by the robots.txt file we see screen shell here at the bottom right so in this screenshot for example at the bottom you see the Salafis this means that everything that is in these forward I will not be accessed by Googlebot or cannot be accessed by booty box now in general we always want to view and understand the page just like regular website visitors and see it if you are loading assets that you're our thumb google you can call these assets or you can visit as its then google can't really websites the way first abusive misfit results in some notifications in Google search console as you see on the screenshot on the right here notification saying page partially loaded so now all these resources could be loaded this can affect how Google sees and understands your page so we want Google to be able to understand our page entirely so we don't want these assets box and robots.txt now you should make sure all your assets like images I can spot my girls are in a publicly available forward so they are not blocked and you can also keep an eye on Google search console for notifications regarding what resources okay next topic module overloads so there are a lot of modules in Drupal and of course you want to add a lot of them since all day all images add good things but we have to watch out a bit I have to be careful modules that you implement that have an impact on site loading pages are of course less good a module that's just using backends doesn't really hurt but a module that loads something when rendering the page every single thing that has to be rendered while loading page of course slows down your site and slows yeah that's not good for Google so vacant so this is a quote from Google we encourage you to start looking at your site speeds not only to improve your ranking in search engine but also to improve everyone's experience an ambulance so it's really important for Google to load your pages very quickly and it was the solution to it actually it's pretty simple just think twice before you install a module if it has an impact on page load and if you really need the module classic example of it is the add to any module which adds a share to Facebook air links we actually don't use it we use a custom solution since the custom solution we use is just adding some links and adds to any load some JavaScript which is very slow well it just a simple link so that's something to consider if you add the module does it impact the page speeds and it's positive or negative way and do I really need it ok let's talk a bit about redirects or chain reactions so if you don't pay close attention to your redirect setup on your server discreet results may be multiple redirects falling off on each other so these are also called redirect chains now these redirect chains are really not user and search engine-friendly because when Googlebot the crawler on Google visits page which returns redirects a system so for example at 301 or 302 then Googlebot will add the next page to the bottom of its to visits list for that website so Google BOTS does not crawl all pages of your entire website every single day it has a list of pages of your website and it just goes down that list now there it stumbles upon URL that has a 301 redirects and adds the new URL at the bottom of that list now for small websites this isn't really a big problem but from big websites this could result in very slow connects Asian facts because when Google BOTS visits a patient wants to index it but it returns at 301 then that's when page will be added at the bottom of the list so this will result of very slow annexation facts this is a screenshot of our delivery directories this shows that we visited a page on HTTP and without the little value this resultant and 301 redirects redirecting to the Dahlia version which and which then redirected to the HTTPS version with the W's so it would be better to combine these two redirects into one and a few visits the first URL you are immediately redirected to the last one so combined redirects wherever that's possible the solution for this we all are most of us probably have seen these lines in the default HT password of Drupal it's fine to just uncomment this for small sites they do have bigger sites it better to think like hey what are the redirects of my site and change this was a bit too quick do something more like this like if it's the HTTP that we do then go to that one if it's that one go to that one and it's not a one just to combine those double redirects to get the middle one out so that's only one redirect into instead of to remix yeah lastly the next letter the Google also said that from I think five or six redirect hops it will start ignoring your your URL entirely so just trying to combine them whenever possible let's talk a bit about security DS that could have a big impact on their SEO so if you allow public file uploads on your website for one case this could result in lower organic traffic when it's not self so for example the files can be uploaded without some form of adaptation or capture it good results in spammers uploading thousands of files and all these files being indexed by Google a specific example would be if you allow you have jobs on your website or you allow people to submit applications and to upload their resume this could mean that if this form is not a half alligators or another capture this could mean a spammers cookies that for new uploads torrance for example so that's what you see here is a screenshot of a website that contains a lot of torrents that were uploaded which is a or something you do not want and it's it's lonely that's for your website for your server but it's also bad for your SEO so this is a screenshot from the search console and this screenshot says one issued affecteds page affected by mental actions are either demoted in Google search results or removed entirely so this means Google noticed there was there was a spam on this website and said yeah we're going to put a manual action on your website next between your page or whereby websites be removed from the appendix with a deck which could have a huge impact on your business of course and all these manual actions they really are manual indicates that is actually a Google employee and is a review in your website noticing the spam and adding like this is not something that's automated this is really inaudible deep that adds those things they are also very hard to get rid of you get rid of them when it's pretty hard so whatever you can we do not want manual access just a quote from the from Google itself so Google issues of an election against the site when any would relieve you at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines so it's a real answer you believe you were to Google employee slaps your site with a manual action so try to avoid those forever again yeah so this is really important one luckily there's quite a simple solution and when you have a forum on your website just as reCAPTCHA there are two modules that I can suggest the recapture that you probably all know and the simple reCAPTCHA which is less known I'll quickly go over the advantages and disadvantages of both and so the reCAPTCHA is a widely used one that allows 8x forums and it's fine X 21 big back page but the problem with this one and it's been used quite widely but it actually disables caching on every page where it captures ads I don't know if a lot of people know this but if you have for example four minutes on every page and you add the Google reCAPTCHA module which everyone use then all pages that contain that forum will receive received a no catch no cache tag so that's a pretty big impact on the speed of your website because we detected this issue as well one of our developers created another module simple reCAPTCHA it's less advanced than the recaptured module and I said it doesn't allow Ajax forms which the recapture form to capture module does but it does allow caching so if you have a forum on every page then I would advise to look at simple reCAPTCHA so that the caching doesn't get no cashed the other thing this is more for gdpr and all those things is to think if I have an upload form where should those be put should those be set in the public files or is it possible to put them in a private files it was for example resume of customers for job applicants then you don't want those public in next for example in my resume my name is in there my address in there to the phone numbers in there I would hate it if that gets on Google just by uploading a form on website so when possible talk to use the private files upload and it's also advice it puts those folders outside of your duck boots this should be common knowledge but I prefer to say it's one kind extra okay so now let's talk about the difference is we will 60 and no index so contrary to popular belief you walk in a page using the robot Steve speed or adding a no index directive to the make a rule stack they are not the same thing so robot Steve skeet instructions will impact crawling not indexing and analytics directive for example by using a make a very own page for impact the indexing of that page does not the crawling on it so this is a very specific and important difference so about Steve speed is for crawling the web X is for indexing now it sounds pretty weird but Google is able to stumble on link on some external website that's linking to a page which is blocked by robots.txt and Google will still in exits now this results the result of this will most likely be a slippage in search without the tribal or dispersion because google can't read the title only the description but the URL could still be any index even though in sports by robots.txt now I can give somebody thinking wait a second I understand it could happen in theory that this index even though it's box but does it really happen in breakfast and actually yes it does happen in practice in some cases so for example here we have a screen shots of drupal.org which doesn't have a description it does have Bible it just has a little became URL now if we dig into why this is the case we found they're not Steve Steve and if you look at their arms region it says Google will pick up some strange homepage URL somewhere and this allows the entire slash home for all thing that was really or else will disappear from the index but of course like I just said this only impacts the calling and not be advancing so Google is still able to index it and it has effective but it's just not able to crawl it which is why there's no typos or inscription so this is not really a good way of trying to remove a page from the Google index actually if they would want that page to be removed from the index then they should remove the entire robots leaves the instructions so this is this love / found should be removed and they should simply have either a no index director with that page of X or linkages for for the page and from basis for reports or four times plus it's called Fulton then Google from the NX after a while so if you want pages removed from the FX do not block them using robots.txt next up are some Google Analytics horror now of course correct data in Google Analytics or another analytics tool is very important when people are analyzing their SEO efforts now I know this is not something developers usually take a look at but if you are just watching the site you should or in a couple of months you should they goes attention to sudden drops and spikes in Google Analytics data because sometimes there might be a configuration issue I don't want your customer calling you a couple months later saying there's an issue which you could have prevented so they post attention through some rough spikes for example this is a screenshot showing the amount of users to web sites and we can see that in the beginning of January 2019 that there was a slice or they'd increase in the amount of users now this could be customers saying well done our condoms efforts our SEO efforts are finally paid off but in this case that really wasn't it wasn't what was happening so what was happening was that the you completed yc- sorry was updated the update of this module resulted in each page show starting a new session as long as website visitors didn't accept the cookies so for example if I browse to the web site and I visited ten pages then this would result in ten sessions of one page each instead of one session of ten pages so this is really messing with the data there's a couple of possible solutions for this the first solution is this one and this one to be achieved your compliance we will analyze the visitors IP address from this will be done either in Google Analytics or Google tag manager depending on what we use for tracking so the Left screenshot is Google Analytics the one below it is Google tag manager and we will just set the anonymized ID something to true this will make sure that the IP addresses the last part of its are normalized so they are not personally identifiable information which is to achieve your seconds in this step this rooster face we will whitelist the google analytics cookies in the Drupal module so then you can see on the right-hand side we have three white listed cookies and these are the Google Analytics cookies now this whole thing advised make sure that Google Analytics is always executed but the IP address is anonymous there is also another possible solution which I'm going to explain yeah the second solution is more the developers approach there's an update or patch for the Google Analytics module to be compliant with the egg to be combined with the EU compliance it will only start tracking as soon as people have pushed the ok button of the quick Oakland compliance module so this will of course be reduced in your page visits since I don't know how many percentage or the people really click the button but as long as they don't click the ok button they're not being tracked so this is a more DTP are compliant solution but I don't think is the best for your SEO results yeah Percy wants as much data as possible so anonymizing is often the better solution but it could depends on your own situation now let's take a look at our translators confidence on your website so if you have the multilingual website they should be translated 100% whenever that is possible because if comment is not translated through all of an official comment from the default language which is which is often English so this good result and English confidence being shown on the French section on websites for example now this is not ideal for a couple of reasons for what it would scare away non-english speakers and it could also confuse Google because if you have a French page when we label sites and it has a French section with untranslated confidence then it could indicate that your header is in French your photo is in French but the contents is an English for example that could you make signals to Google because Google will think is this an English page or is it a French page and this will have an impact on your SEO rankings so what impossible you should translate and of course so the solution depends of course on situation for this you have to sit together with your clients first question of course can you translate everything here is that an option if not then maybe the solution is to deny access to entrance their pages this can be done with a module such as the content language access module but preferably apply and translate everything but when a client is really lazy or it's not possible then this might be a better solution yeah able to talk a bit about more about that first case you could also say we can stress in everything we can add a lot of confidence to that page and say this page is not available in French but in French that translated of course a link through the English version so that's an option as well maybe that way you can follow up on your Google Analytics and you can see if people visit that page people have been interested and if yes it might be a good idea to translate it so next up we will add a couple of rapid-fire best practices so for tracking you should use the Google Analytics module or the Google tag manager module you should not use both of these modules together now if you do these modules together it makes your tracking set up very prone to errors and we have seen this time and time again that this happens so for example you will see a screenshot here from Google Analytics and in this case on the 6th or 7th of May the Google tag manager module must add its through websites and Google are the extracting was also added to Google tag manager so basically this means that the page use the patron data is sent twice to Google Analytics once because of the rheumatics module and once becomes with tracking server within Google that matter so if a client sees this they might think oh yes or pages went up we did a good job but actually you're just sending twice the amount of pages to Google then we need to set so we'll be careful with this and use Google Analytics or tag manager local in most cases Google tag manager is the best way to go since you can consolidate all your tracking information in one version the second one when possible aggregated minify your CSS and JavaScript files makes your page load faster you will like to sports websites so yeah also make sure each page has correct and well-configured canonical tag now depending on the complexity of your websites you might want to learn an SEO specialist review all your canonical tags because there can be a lot of small issues the value under setup now to be honest even for small websites I advise you to really take a close look at your articles make sure they are set up correctly and just let specialists have a look at it there are some specific best practices here you should always use absolute URLs and inaudible that this is something who will actually explicitly set so if you should use absolute URLs not relative once you should also make sure that all these canonical tags reserve status code of two hundred economical for example two www.umanot.com W another example is that you have any HTTP web sites but there are another holes are substituted HTTP version the non-secure over so these will redirect them to another page so your color gold up return to hundreds so make sure all your articles returns things go to another now also in most cases you will use from the canonical URL for example if you have a web shop with some message filtering on price or or on brands and specifically probably modify your URL you don't want these parameters to be added to the canonical URL of that page now there are some exceptions let's say you have a webshop and one of your your largest products is for example white Cedars and these are bloodshot passive filters as well then you might wonder the white sneakers parameters and economic goals so Google can index that page separately since it's an important promise category so there are some exceptions but in general you want to invest URL parameters and when that's the case also maybe have a look at the passes pretty parts to not just use query parameters that really use decent URLs the next rapid-fire thought automobile everyone should know it everyone should be using it so now I'm going to cover it in the detail but just don't forget to translate them as well this for example an example it's a Dutch website and the URL is slash products while in Dutch I don't know how many people here know - but it's Edison's products but product in like stop you should follow up on the amount of pages indexed by Google this can be done by using Google search console so here you can see in this conference reports that for this specific websites there are two hundred sixty three thousand value RLS in ex parte 2 now if it seems a bit high then the baby's arrived at all set up needed to remove pages from the index so if we look back at our first our second points we talked about the thieves overview page and every team member B indexable and having its own separate page maybe that is the issue here if your page count seems too high and maybe you need to adjust around full circle if it seems to know if I go back the screenshot shows too few pages in your eyes then maybe some important pages are no invest maybe there's a default map of X I think somewhere that no indexes of pages so you could take a look over there but we keep an eye on the cows here on your conference reports and see how much pages are indexed and this sort of us matches what you thought it would be ok Sadhna take a look at your site map it should copy the URL but a lot of websites we've seen have HTTP defaults in the URL in the site now this can be to miss configuration about the site map some more information can be found on this page then the next side I'm also going to cover the best solutions we've found and so Oh apparently this sucks like me to it so I'll just tell it without showing so the first solution if you if possible at your base URL to your settings on PHP but in some cases that isn't possible if that's the case it's not possible oh there it is slide and so the our solution is if you're executing from don't forget at URL to your chrome and if you add this the start will generate without the default if you forget to do those two things 95% of the time your sitemap will contain default in URL which is of course not a good practice yeah that was the sweetshop shown here so if you submit a signed by the sidewalk which contains HTTP default for example then it will show something like this so it will show some minutes eye drops submit your own 404 so this is not something you want this is a screenshot of the user search also vibrant next up you want to create some checklists so this is common knowledge journey but you should keep your checklist handy for things that have to be done before you go live things you have to check just one decide what life takes to check one side is like for an amount of days so for example that Google Analytics and things like that follow that up once every seven days or something and then the first days after wash and we go over these checklists either in that or in SEO these are important things to follow on because small things could have a big impact in SEO so follow these okay so make sure you have all the available tools to increase in speed up your website and set a cup of time Google takes into account the speed of your website so default ripple caching should be enabled for everyone keep in mind to the simple recapture a Google reCAPTCHA that one breaks all these things the other solutions varnish memcached or Redis it possible for your website try to install one of multiple of them and also the advanced aggregation is also a speed boost but these are for most sites the filter part caching will be okay for bigger sites I highly advise one of the other ones as well yeah sure fräulein complete question but when you set up the part auto I think it will automatically set economic goals and yeah the URL perfectly so when you go to the correct page it will show the pop auto-generated page and the canonical it will show the correct one I don't know I think it's a what's the correct one and economical not the notes but the real parts right oh yeah should never contain your URL yeah when you set up the bottle - it will do it perfectly for you I don't know if that answers your question also your access time yeah there should be both accessible but the note is always accessible and a bottle will be if you help correctly and there are other questions you want just one yeah yeah then the canonical is very important that's right water to prevent duplicates pages as economical as the most important parts to prevents duplicated pages yeah yeah so is your website things or same box effects or mobile pages and if you have a couple of pages which contain exactly the same contents then you can say to Google haver Google I I know I have duplicate pages but you should only index this one page and that one page is that the canonical URL so the canonical URL is an indication for Google to say this is the URL you want to address something else get another question yeah how do you suggest handling ages to get them get removed from the website if someone is known their bad in a month or it's just something that's no longer there or something do you just simply remove for the next item button or you redirect somewhere else well best practice is to redirect to another one just for usability of a site but it depends on what kind of pages was I think it was like page like I'm going to say opening hours and you have an outer page that has the same then of course you try to redirect but if it's yeah if the shop has been closed down then you don't really need to redirect or redirect to the home page maybe so it kind of depends on what kind of page you're talking about so try to yeah but the default one it's best to what you can do when it's best to maybe yeah so if I if I understand it correctly because the volume is pretty low and you were asking what the correct or the best approaches when is no longer on the website so hidden camera movements or redirected right deputies yeah okay so that depends on the type of conference say for example you have workshop with the poet's category as we lose you decided not to sell these products anymore then you get in just 404 page because it's not relevant anymore to rank for it in Google because you don't service poets anymore you don't have another category that looks like it so you just fall for it but say for example you stopped selling men's shoes but you still sell women's shoes you could redirect all the the men's shoes your house to your women for example because it's irrelevant page has something to do with each other so if the pages are contextually relevant you can usually direct but if you're not so you can just remove the columns another example is is when you're for example place use item on your website saying we will be closed during the summer months after 20 if that page is no longer relevant but you you go to the next year for 2021 for example you could just redirect the old URL to the new URL so then you don't have to remove your information of your opening hours or your vacation time that you can just redirects to the latest page containing the latest information so redirects whatever possible and when I go always when if it's comments that is really no longer relevant and you give this for 4 days someone else another question no not really then everyone thanks for listening if you need if you have other questions feel free to contact us yeah you can contact us on LinkedIn or true mail or on Twitter arm as well and I will be around here what obviously not maybe for another year but everyone thanks for your [Applause]