Changing to Drupal and Maintaining Search Engine Rankings

So you’ve decided to change to Drupal, or maybe you are making a major upgrade from a really old version of Drupal to a more modern one and you are concerned about your SEO.

Changing content management systems will impact your search engine optimization (SEO), but with careful consideration and planning this can be a positive change rather than a negative one.

What is SEO

There are many misconceptions about search engine optimization, and part of that is because the industry has often been cast in a negative light. Really SEO is the process of making sure your website meets certain guidelines and standards so search engines can understand its content, relevance, and value to users.

We all want to make sure the right users find our websites. This requires attention to many facets to SEO such as technical SEO, content SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, local SEO, and more. Each has its own rules, guidelines, and expectations and these change over time and from one search engine to another.

Drupal and Technical SEO

Drupal is already very technical SEO focused. But you might be wondering, what do you mean by technical SEO?

Think of technical SEO as the behind-the-scenes code that makes your website search engine friendly. It is about ensuring crawlers, search engine robots, can easily understand and index your content.

Some aspects of Technical SEO include:

• Site structure: the logical hierarchy of pages with clear navigation
• Crawlability: using robots.txt correctly, having valid sitemaps, and ensuring pages are accessible to search engine crawlers
• Page speed: optimizing images, minimizing code, and using proper caching techniques
• Mobile friendliness: checking that your website adapts to different screen sizes
• Security: using SSL certificates to encrypt data transmission

Drupal comes with some built-in SEO features and allows for extensive customization and control over these technical aspects. With built-in caching, search engine friendly URLs, and many modules that can further improve Drupal’s SEO, you can achieve great search rankings with a Drupal powered website.

Google and the Moving Bar of SEO

Unfortunately, search engine optimization is not a “set and forget” task. Google is constantly moving the bar relating to what is good for SEO as they continue to try to stop people from exploiting the search engine’s ranking system for their own needs. They are also trying to aim websites towards certain improvements and changes that they value most.

A trailing slash was used by Google used to determine the final URL but not anymore

In the past, www.example.com/page/ really was assumed to be www.example.com/page/index.html and www.example.com/page was more similar to saying www.example.com/page.html to Google. These two were not always equivalent and sites sometimes had both.

Google is now smarter than that when they do their rankings and create all kinds of assumed equivalencies when determining page level rankings. This means that Google will often assume that www.example.com/page and www.example.com/page/ are the same, but it never hurts to make sure you have a canonical tag to help Google understand that they are the same. Learn more about Canonical tags.

My recommendation would be to not be so concerned about having or not having a trailing slash on your content. If you are changing from one to the other when changing your CMS, Google will figure it out over a short period of time. Just make sure you have redirects in place if necessary.

Rankings Lost Through Redirect(s)

It has long been said that Google doesn’t completely pass their ranking values through redirects. So if you change the permalink of a page, it might not be ranked as well even if you have a redirect set to move the visitor from the original URL to the new one.

This is especially true if you can’t get third parties to update the backlinks you have to that page.

So for example, if I had a link from acquia.com that went to a page on my site called /malcolm-is-the-best/ and then I changed it to /best-malcolm/ and used a redirect, no matter the type, some of the potential ranking power from the link from acquia.com would be lost and the /best-malcolm/ page might not be as competitive in search rankings.

To combat this, your goal should always be to earn new backlinks from credible sources. If I could get Acquia to update the link that they have, then this would likely help in making sure my page ranks similarly to what it did previously. And if I continued to work on garnering relevant and valuable new links to this new URL, then I could potentially move up in ranking over time.

Often when moving from one CMS to another or changing your default permalink structure, you will be required to redirect from old URLs to new ones, and Google should pick up on these changes quickly, especially if you submit an updated sitemap in Google Search Console.

Note: Some content management systems automatically strip out stop words or filler words, removing “an,” “the,” “of” from the alias of the page, but with Drupal you can configure this as needed.

Tip: Most search engines have a way to submit a sitemap, so even if you don’t get much traffic from others, it is a quick process and a good way to make sure their indexes have your most up to date page URLs.

Changing the Underlying Code

Assuming you are able to customize Drupal to make sure your URLs all match what they were previously, and you don’t need any redirects, you’ll still likely see a shake up in your rankings when you change content management systems because your page code will be different.

Google and other search engines often will look at the code-to-content ratio of a page. SEO experts used to talk about thin content penalties, but these days, it is less about thin content and more about page performance. Google wants pages to load quickly so that visitors can get the answers they need.

When you change content management systems, or even change the code of the theme you are using for your Drupal powered website, you can cause search engines to re-evaluate your website.

So if you are going to make that change, you’ll want to consider a few points:

• Will the new site load faster than the previous version on both desktop and mobile?
• Will it have fewer accessibility and SEO issues than the previous version?
• Does it follow more of Google’s best practices?

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights on your current site to establish a baseline. If you can improve your scores across the board, you are much more likely to come out ahead in your post-transition rankings.

Improve Your Drupal SEO with Acquia SEO

If you are looking to improve your SEO on your Drupal powered website, Acquia SEO powered by Conductor can assist with reviewing your content, providing you feedback on your length and readability, and confirm proper use of structure and patterns.

For more on Acquia SEO, please reach out to your Account Manager or contact Acquia Support.