SEO for zikula :: Zikula Community :: Support at your fingertips

SEO for zikula

By default,Zikula IS optimized for SEO, and you can easily customize your modules in order to increase your rank in the search engine. Indeed, multiples officials plugins have been created in order to help you for that purpose.

Note that,

this tips could be outdated in the future.
i will talk only about intern SEO,
this tips can help your SEO, but can not "decrease" your rank (that's not dark SEO)

Customize title

You can customize the general title of your Zikula, by filling in the correspondant fields in the module "settings". The problem is that, you will have only one title for the whole website ... and that's ugly (and bad for SEO).

In order to customize the title tags, you ve got two smarty 'pnpageaddvar' and 'pnpagesetvar '

<!--[ pnpageaddvar name="title" value="mon titre"]-->
concatenate your title with the current one

<!--[ pnpagesetvar name="title" value="mon titre"]-->
 
replace the current title

This plugin allow you to format titles like this

 Classic titles 
HTML for Module Developers - A Discussion :: pnCommunity :: Support at your fingertips

 Improved titles 
HTML for Module Developers

If you're using pnForum?, it will give you title like this

 pnForum  title 
<!--[ pnpageaddvar name="title" value="$topic.topic_title|pnvarprepfordisplay|pnvarcensor" ]-->

Customize meta "descriptions" and "keywords"

You can customize the meta "descriptions" and "Keywords" of you CMS, by filling in the correspondant field in the "settings" module, but with this customisation, you will have only one "description" and "keywords" fields for all the site.

1. order to customize this you can use this smarty

<!--[ pnpageaddvar name="description" value="ma description"]-->
<!--[ pnpageaddvar name="keywords" value="mes mots clés"]-->

Notes: pnpagesetvar works fine with those too.
Notes : As the Search engine were spammed by overloaded keywords tags, for most of them , they don't consider this tags anymore.
If you're using pnForum?, it will give you this :

 pnForum metas  
<!--[ pnpageaddvar name="description" value=$topic.posts[0].post_text|strip|truncate:600:" "]-->

For the keywords tags, you have activate them in 'settings' and modify your master.html in order to add a "dynamic" parameter

		 meta name="keywords" content="<!--[keywords dynamic=true]-->"

Activate URL rewriting

You can activate the URL rewriting in Xanthia, go to the Xanthia module, then check the options "use short urls", and copy paste the .htaccess file from the "doc" folder to the root of you CMS.

/!\ Be careful, live search doesn't index URL with more than two dashes
More information about the new url rewriting can be found at url rewriting for zikula∞

Duplicate content

Don't duplicate links in your portal, two differents links must not point to the same content. Indeed, some search engine don't like to see multiples versions of the same page on a website (that's called "duplicate content")

To avoid this, you can use a robots.txt at the root of the CMS

    Robots.txt 
     User-agent: *   
     Disallow: admin.php   
     Disallow: config/*    
     Disallow: header/*    
     Disallow: footer/* 
     Disallow: pntables/*   
     Disallow: /images/*  
     Disallow: /includes/*  
     Disallow: /themes/* 
     Disallow: /pnTemp/*   
     Disallow: /docs/*   
     Disallow: /javascript/*  
     Disallow: *.php   
     Disallow:module-Forum-viewtopic-topic-*-start-0.html

An other tip, "/index.php", "/index.html" and "/" redirect to the same page so you can add this rule in you .htaccess

 .htaccess 
  RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://zikula.org [NC,R=301]  
  RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://zikula.org [NC,R=301]

Notes, that it could be a good idea to limit your RSS feeds of your website, some spammy websites are using them to create 'articificial' content.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html∞

Text formating

In your articles or templates, try to have a structured layout with H1, H2, H3 tags.

Auto links and intern link

The module "multihook" is interesting, because he allows you to create a large amount of intern links with the same source anchor, this will help to increase your rank on the given word. Notes that the new version has a new ajax option that allow you to add link in one click (press 'ctrl' and select the word)

404 error

When you've got an important portal with a large number of pages , it may be possible some of you ranked pages doesn't exist anymore. When search engine bots come to look for this "ghost" pages, you can redirect them to the home of your website, with an "Error 404" header.

 .htaccess 
   ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

Take off unused metas tags

For most of them, search engine bots don't read some meta like "revist-after", so you can take them of your head tags. It will not help you, but you will have a cleaner header.

 xxx.html 
meta name="revisit-after" content="1 days"

Notes: the titles are already customized in pnforum, the example are only here to show what can be done

Valid XHTML∞ :: Valid CSS∞ :: Powered by pnWikka 1.0∞ (A wiki fork from WikkaWiki∞)

3 Comments so far

(Latest comments )

1. mumuri wrote on Jun 17, 2008 at 07:01 AM

you can create article with

http://community.zikula.org/module-Wiki-edit-tag-mycustomtitle.htm

don't forget to add a title to your article ... seo spirit

2. ZarToXidE wrote on Jun 28, 2008 at 06:13 PM

Few mistakes in this article:

Meta keywords doesn't add up to SEO. The few search engines that uses this, aren't worth adding the overhead. Drop the keywords, and speed up your site.

Meta description is a description about the page, not about the site. So setting a global description isn't wise to do. If you want to use the meta description to add it for SEO. Make sure they're unique, not identical.

About autolinks:

QuoteThe module "MultiHook" is interesting, because he allows you to create a large amount of intern links with the same source anchor, this will help to increase your rank on the given word.

This module doesn't do any good for SEO. As described above, this is what the module does, but only if the user isn't a spider. This means no URL are being made if Google/MSN/Yahoo comes along.

To have MultiHook work for SEO, the module should not cloak, and parse all items, regardless of the user-agent. ATM it doesn't parse anything set with this module as the user-agent tells it's a search-engine.

3. mumuri wrote on Jul 03, 2008 at 07:57 AM

ok so first you can talk about complements but not mistake (the part about "keywords" was already in it, moreover the speed you will win from it is really noticeable ...)

then for MultiHook, you right , i forget to add that if you want them to be accessible by spiders you have to edit

modules/MultiHook/pnuserapi.php

in the function
MultiHook_userapitransform

Comment this part and link will be put bot spiders.

Code

// check the user agent - if it is a bot, return immediately
    /*$robotslist = array ( "ia_archiver",
                          "googlebot",
                          "mediapartners-google",
                          "yahoo!",
                          "msnbot",
                          "jeeves",
                          "lycos");
    $useragent = pnServerGetVar('HTTP_USER_AGENT');
    for($cnt=0; $cnt < count($robotslist); $cnt++) {
        if(strpos(strtolower($useragent), $robotslist[$cnt]) !== false) {
            return $text;
        }
    }*/

Documentation Wiki

Wiki : SEO

SEO for zikula

Customize title

Customize meta "descriptions" and "keywords"

Activate URL rewriting

Duplicate content

Text formating

Auto links and intern link

404 error

Take off unused metas tags

3 Comments so far

1. mumuri wrote on Jun 17, 2008 at 07:01 AM

2. ZarToXidE wrote on Jun 28, 2008 at 06:13 PM

3. mumuri wrote on Jul 03, 2008 at 07:57 AM

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