SEO Friend Module

Well, I was poking around in the Search Engine Optimization group on Groups.Drupal.org today, and I found a new SEO module that has some great features. Ok, so it's not brand new, but it's new to me! It compliments several other great Drupal SEO modules that will help your Drupal site optimized for search engines. The module is called SEO Friend, and was created by Kristen Pol, kepol on Drupal.org. Kristen has been programming in Drupal since 2004, although this looks like her first module release. So far it is looking pretty good!

While there are plenty of external SEO tools out there that allow you to run some sort of SEO report on your site, most SEO modules for Drupal basically perform a specific function of SEO rather than report on much. The few exceptions to this would be SEO Checklist and Links Checker. The SEO Checklist Module checks to see what SEO based Drupal modules you are, or aren't running, and suggests others to download and install to your server, while the Links Checker module will periodically check for broken links within your content. The SEO Friend module is another module that allows you to run some very useful reports for your Drupal Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Ok, enough about how cool it is, let's lay out some of the great features that I find most useful about this module. First of all, it has a great overall report called the "Main Report". This report report allows you to get a summary of all the other available reports, and gives you an overview of what other SEO related Drupal modules you have installed and enabled. This list is very concise and gives you a good description of what each module will do for your site. Some might not be needed depending on how in depth you want to take your SEO, but all are great suggestions for a very well optimized Drupal site.

Working our way across the the tabs within the module, you will come to the "Meta Tags (node) Report" tab. This report lists out all of the meta tags for all nodes on your site, and lists duplicates. In recent months, it has been confirmed by both Yahoo and Google that they no longer use the meta keywords tag in their ranking algorithms, while Microsoft seems to still count the field. Google also does not use the Meta Description in their ranking algorithm, but rather does use them to show as the snippet in their results. With that in mind, this tab is probably not as important as it used to be earlier this year, but can still get you the information you need if you want to optimize your Meta Tags.

The next tab is the "Meta Tags (path) Report". This report won't work unless you are already running the nodewords_path module. I am currently not running this particular module, so I cannot give much extra info on this tab, but it seems that it will show the same data that the previous Meta Tags report, but specifically for Meta Tags built out with the nodewords_path module.

Making your way to the next tab, the "Page Title Report", this is probably the most important report that this module has to offer. Duplicate page titles confuse the search engines as to which page is the actual page you want them to index and display in their results. This report gives you all the information you need to easily take care of any duplicates within your Drupal site. It displays the node id for each content page, as well as the publish status and node title. Next is the page title field, but not only will it show you what the current page title is, if you have the page title auto-created it will show you the pattern. Example: Auto-created from pattern: [page-title] | [site-name] The next field is the duplicates field, which is what you really need to be looking at. Any node ids that have a number or multiple numbers in this column, the node id for the offending page titles, should have a custom page title made if possible.

The next report is a very short report, and perhaps in future releases there will be more information on this tab. This tab is for the Pathauto Report. Currently, this report only shows what your current setting is for yourPathauto aliases, and if that setting is an optimal setting or not. I think a great feature for this tab would be to possibly show what nodes currently have aliases made, how many, and if they are redirecting properly. Just so everyone knows, the optimal setting for creating Pathauto aliases is Create new alias. Redirect from old alias. This allows for the most SEO value to be passed onto new paths for nodes and avoids duplicate content.

The final report within the SEO Friend module for right now is the "Referrers" tab. This is the only tab not marked as a report, so possibly that was a mistake as the information still looks like a report to me. I am currently only testing this module locally, so I can only see internal referral information, but I do plan on testing it on some live sites in the very near future as it is showing some promising stats. I look forward to seeing what kind of information if shows on a live site, and not in a production environment. I will surely post an update once I have some more data on this particular feature of the module.

Overall, I have to say that SEO Friend module has several features that make it a must have for anyone looking to make their job doing Drupal SEO easier. While Google Webmaster Tools can provide you with similar data in most cases, you can identify what nodes are the problems quicker and easier from within your own site. Some other features I would like to see out of this module would be a way to export reports in CSV or XML format, and possibly a way to filter out just problem nodes in the reports so the reports are not so huge on a larger sites with thousands of nodes. This is definitely a new module going into my Drupal SEO toolbox and I will be following the SEO Friend project closely adding my suggestions.