SEO

Something I've hated about running community sites on Drupal is the cursed Spam Link Deterrent filter.

The idea behind this filter is that it applies rel="nofollow" to any links in user-generated content. And the reason this is necessary is that when you have a membership site and you allow users to create content on it, you inadvertently attract spammers who want to drop links back to their own site.

By applying the nofollow attribute, you are telling search engines not to count that link as 'editorially approved' - therefore, the spammer doesn't derive any value from the link. The problem with the Spam Link Deterrent is that it's an all or nothing solution - even internal links to other content on the site get this added to them. This means that your site loses a lot of value from natural internal links.

About two years ago, I decided that I wasn't going to SEO this site. Admittedly, I've deviated from this strategy subtly in the intervening time.

For a start, I ditched the Garland theme in preference of my own design, which uses XHTML, is easily crawlable and very semantically correct. I noticed the other day that somewhere along the line, I installed the nodewords module for Drupal - possibly in testing for another site - but I'm not complaining about the individualised meta tags it creates.