There were a ton of great SEO modules for Drupal 6, which made it a go to content management system for those looking to easily optimize their websites for search engines like Google and Bing. Some modules have made the switch from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 fairly quickly and easily, while others are still on a slow path to getting a Drupal 7 release. In the following article, we take a look at where some of the top Drupal SEO modules are in their development cycle right now for Drupal 7 and find some new modules to help make sure your Drupal 7 website is fully optimized for search engines.
Currently, Nodewords, is the one module that we have found that people are really looking for in Drupal 7, but the new Metatags module that Dave Reid is working on is not quite ready for showtime yet. There has been some progress made by others in the community to come up with a quick fix for the time being. You can find the Meta Tags Quick module, http://drupal.org/project/metatags_quick, by valthebald, currently with a full Drupal 7 release that will give you some quick and dirty meta tags functionality through the new Fields API in Drupal 7. Meta tags don’t seem to hold as much importance for search engine rankings as they used to back in the early days of search engine optimization, but they can help fill in the blanks for more semantic style markup and RDF that shopping and news search engines use.
The list of fully released Drupal 7 SEO modules is somewhat small compared to Drupal 6, but slowly growing with more modules coming out of alpha and beta. Currently there are only 19 full projects listed that have anything to do with SEO for Drupal 7. It also looks like Drupal 7 should have some great search engine optimization support from new module builders as well. We have compiled a list of all the SEO modules for Drupal 7 we could find. We have compiled our list from Drupal.org with their handy new Apache Solr search capability. The list is in order of usage. You should take a look at this list, and take a look at your Drupal 7 installation, and make sure you are running most of these modules if you are trying to take Drupal 7 SEO seriously.
The list of Drupal 7 SEO Modules list, as of 6/11/11
- Pathauto - http://drupal.org/project/pathauto - Full release, beta
- Page Title - http://drupal.org/project/page_title - Full release, beta
- SEO Checklist - http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist - Full release, beta
- Custom Page - http://drupal.org/project/custompage - alpha release
- Taxonomy Title - http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_title - dev release
- Revisioning - http://drupal.org/project/revisioning - Full release, beta
- SEO Compliance Checker - http://drupal.org/project/seo_checker - Full release
- SimpleHTMLdom API - http://drupal.org/project/simplehtmldom - Full release
- SEO Watcher - http://drupal.org/project/seowatcher - Full release, beta
- Droptor - http://drupal.org/project/droptor - Full release
- Extended Path aliases - http://drupal.org/project/path_alias_xt - Full release, beta
- Simple Page TItle - http://drupal.org/project/simple_page_title - dev release
- Internal Links - http://drupal.org/project/intlinks - Full release
- 443 Session - http://drupal.org/project/session443 - dev release
- Smart Paging - http://drupal.org/project/smart_paging - Full release
- Humans.txt - http://drupal.org/project/humanstxt - Full release
- Extended Search Page - http://drupal.org/project/ext_search_page - Full release, beta
- Pretty Facets Paths for Search API - http://drupal.org/project/search_api_facets_paths - Full release
- Semantic Fields - http://drupal.org/project/semantic_fields - dev release
That doesn’t seem to be the full list of helpful SEO modules though. We did another search on the Drupal.org website for just “search engine” and came up with a few more for our list. If you aren’t satisfied with your search results, always try a few more combinations of ways to say what you are looking for our you might miss out on the best results.
- Token - http://drupal.org/project/token - Full release, beta
- Google Analytics - http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics - Full release
- Link - http://drupal.org/project/link - Full release, alpha
- XML sitemap - http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap - Full release, beta
- Global Redirect - http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect - Full release
- Search 404 - http://drupal.org/project/search404 - Full release
- Nodequeue - http://drupal.org/project/nodequeue - alpha release
- Site Verification - http://drupal.org/project/site_verify - Full release
- Service Links - http://drupal.org/project/service_links - dev release
- Similar by Terms - http://drupal.org/project/similarterms - alpha release
- Relevant Content - http://drupal.org/project/relevant_content - dev release
- Meta Tags Quick - http://drupal.org/project/metatags_quick - Full release
- Google Analytics Reports - http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics_reports - dev release
- Menu attributes - http://drupal.org/project/menu_attributes - Full release, RC1
- Scheduler - http://drupal.org/project/scheduler - Full release
Now we have presented you with 34 Drupal SEO modules that are available in some sort of way for Drupal 7. We have listed each module with their current development status. If you are really in need of one of these modules, you should jump into the module’s issue queue and see if you can help test out some patches or even post some patches yourself.
There are quite a few Drupal 6 SEO modules that haven’t had a proper Drupal 7 release yet. We have compiled a list of these modules based on what SEO modules we found available on Drupal.org through the Apache Solr search results. You will see that some great Drupal SEO modules are still not available for Drupal 7.
- SEO Friend - http://drupal.org/project/seo_friend - Waiting for Metatags module
- Sub-path URL aliases - http://drupal.org/project/subpath_alias - soon to be subpathauto
- Content Analysis - http://drupal.org/project/contentanalysis - no response on D7 port
- Content Optimizer - http://drupal.org/project/contentoptimizer - no response on D7 port
- Glossify Internal Links - http://drupal.org/project/glossify - port testing
- Keyword Research - http://drupal.org/project/kwresearch - no data
- Keyword Analysis - http://drupal.org/project/kwanalysis - no response yet
- View Alias - http://drupal.org/project/view_alias - not sure
- Keywords - http://drupal.org/project/keywords - not sure
- Alchemy - http://drupal.org/project/alchemy - wants to port, but not until December
- Drupal SEO Tools - http://drupal.org/project/seotools - no answer in issue queue
- Readability Analyzer - http://drupal.org/project/readability - waiting for port
- Link Intelligence - http://drupal.org/project/linkintel - not sure
- Scribe SEO Analyzer - http://drupal.org/project/scribeseo - not sure
- Views 404 - http://drupal.org/project/views404 - patch available, needs testing
So there you also have 15 modules that need to get updated to Drupal 7 yet. If you are looking to see these modules in Drupal 7, try submitting patches, helping out in the issue queues for these modules, or testing dev releases for module maintainers. Every little bit helps!
We have a bit of work to do to make Drupal 7 as search engine friendly in contributed modules, but it’s fair to say that some great work has been done so far by people like Dave Reid, Greggles, and Ben Finklea to get modules out there for Drupal 7 that people really need for Drupal SEO. Aside from that, Drupal 7 includes the RDF module, which adds rich semantic markup to all of Drupal 7’s content. This helps tremendously for search and accessibility. It will be interesting to see what other great search engine optimization modules come out for Drupal 7 and beyond.
Stay tuned as we dive further down the Drupal SEO rabbit hole and show you how to install and configure some of the top Drupal 7 SEO modules you need for your Drupal website. Until then, we hope that this article helps you gain better search engine rankings on your Drupal 7 website through the lists of Drupal 7 SEO modules we have provided you with.