Drupal Vs Joomla - SEO Point of view

(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

We all know that search engines does not like pages with meaningless querystrings.

By default, both the CMSs produce alternate URLs with all sorts of numbers and things in the querystring. Both have a feature to produce neat URLs which removes the querystring and adds the numbers as the foldernames within the URL. This makes use of an .htaccess file.

Using the bundled Clean URLs basically removes the “?q=” portion. so an article URL which would otherwise have been “http://www.example.com/?q=node/83″ would now become “http://www.example.com/node/83″. Nice and Easy. Content is always 1 folder deep where the foldername “node” has absolutely no significance.

Joomla however makes multiple URLs for the same content. If once content is linked from different places in different ways, it would make many links with different ItemIDs all pointing to the same content. Default URL structure for Joomla! “http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=26″ it would get rewritten to “http://www.example.com/content/view/17/26/” . In this case the ItemID “26″ may changed based on how your user found the page. Here the content is always 3 folders deep and the words “content” and “view” does absolutely nothing to describe the page in question.

Additional tools do exists lets compare the options available for both these CMSs…

For Drupal Path (A core module) :  Basically what Path does is it allows you to list old urls from our example “node/83″ and make an alias to say “blue-widgets/pricing.html” so the whole URL looks like “http://www.example.com/blue-widgets/pricing.html”. Now this tells the Search Engines(and the users) that the page in question deals about the pricing of Blue Widgets.

For Joomla : Error no such extension found ;)

3rd Party Addons :

Drupal has Pathauto:This module is very robust, user friendly, feature rich and powerful. You can specify custom URLs based on various criteria depending on content type, taxonomy terms and even custom fields within a content. I was surprised tofind that this even removes useless words from the URI. example a content with the title “Thailand: For All Seasons & Reasons!” got the URL “/thailand-all-seasons-reasons.html” aint that wonderful?

Joomla has (among others) OpenSEF : This has some nice features, but not as powerfull or even user friendly as Pathauto. Here all you only have is few limited options spread across dozens of config pages. If you wanted custom components to work, you have to find (beg/borrow/steal) a customized sef_ext.php script for that particular component, not very cool thing to do. In Drupal you can set these things within pathauto only, indipendant of the modules. One thing good about OpenSEF is that it takes care of the duplicate content problem I mentioned earlier, but the downside is that it might not work how it was supposed to work as each URL would now get bound to a particular ItemID.

Some might call me biased towards Drupal, but the bottom line is that Drupal rocks and Joomla Sux!

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Comments (11)Add Comment
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written by Raj K , October 14, 2009
Joomla also has ArtioSEF, the best SEO extension for Joomla. But it is paid.
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written by Raj K, October 14, 2009
Joomla also has ArtioSEF, the best SEO extension for Joomla. But it is paid.
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written by Raj K, October 14, 2009
Joomla also has ArtioSEF, the best SEO extension for Joomla. But it is paid.
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written by BSMeijer, October 14, 2009
And that it is paid is THE biggest problem in 'OPEN SOURCE' software....
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written by SEO Leeds, October 14, 2009
Good and very informative post.SEO Leeds
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written by Anonymous, October 14, 2009
Thank you very much for this useful information.
Please keep on .
I am looking forward to read your next great article.Miami Web Design

Best regards!!!
Sam
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written by Anonymous, October 14, 2009
It is all meter of personal opinion. I personally like Joomla.
I won't say much, but check this extension sh404SEF for Joomla. The best one out there and it is free.
Does all what you need even more with .htaccess including all "famous" Drupal features... rewriting to .html and the rest...

Cheers
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written by Lilian, January 28, 2010
Sure thing, if you are searching for a book, it is better to use special search engines only on ebooks. But as it turns out, there also exist http://www.pdfqueen.com search engines on ebooks formats!
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written by sean.waches, September 03, 2010
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written by [B][URL="http://www.nitgreen/"]WEB DESIGN UK[/URL][/B], February 10, 2011
Hey,

Joomla becomes slow when running with more features,

Drupal is on the other hand strong, SEO friendly and flexible.
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written by syed, September 22, 2011
You’ve obviously put incredible efforts in this blog. Thanks a lot, great work.

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