Drupal vs Joomla - The SEO viewpoint - Part 1 URLs
February 17th, 2008 | by Sajal Kayan |Last month I started using Drupal and explained how Drupal is better in terms of organizing content when compared to Joomla. Today I am going to explain some SEO benifits of using Drupal over Joomla.
This is the first part of a series and I will blog about Search Engine Friendly URLs today:-
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!
Part 1 of the Series. More to follow later on various other aspects on Drupal and Joomla from an SEO viewpoint . Subscribe to my feed to stay updated.
13 Responses to “Drupal vs Joomla - The SEO viewpoint - Part 1 URLs”
By Cubicle Dropout on Feb 17, 2008 | Reply
I use sh404sef component for joomla and it seems to work pretty well. I am definitely curious about the differences between Drupal and Joomla. I basically flipped a coin and went with Joomla.
By Sajal Kayan on Feb 17, 2008 | Reply
Having used Joomla for 1.5 years and Drupal for a month, Im not capable of a side by side complete comparision of the 2 CMS, but will however continue to post some differences as i find them, perhaps a few posts down the line I would be in a position to consolidate the information and make a complete Drupal vs Joomla article.
By Rowan on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply
Another benefit of Drupal’s URLs is they don’t require an extension such as ‘.html’, which just adds clutter.
By Sajal Kayan on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply
@Rowan : I use OpenSEF in Joomla and there is an option for file extension, *probably* if its left blank it would work how you wanted it?
Personally, I like leaving .html on end pages and no .html on listing pages. URL formats are a matter of personal taste.
By vaibhav on Feb 22, 2008 | Reply
dude.. i am new to CMS.. but knowing you well, i vouch for Drupal.. also what updates of SEO of my blog??
cheers mate..
By Amy Stephen on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
Sajal -
I’ve used Drupal for a year, Joomla! for two 1/2 years and WordPress for two years. I hate these types of blogs because they pit open source projects against one another and we are partners, not competitors.
Normally, I ignore such articles. However, I have to tell you that this is inaccurate information.
Three points:
- A professional February 2008 comparison should certainly look at Joomla! v 1.5, not v 1.0.x;
- Joomla! v 1.5 has available SEF URLs (three ways) in the core - no add-ons;
- Joomla! v 1.5 with SEF URLs activated does *not* produce system generated duplicate content.
Drupal and WordPress also have gorgeous SEF URLs and have had for awhile. In this area, WordPress set the gold standard and others followed suit. But, all three projects are there.
Kind regards,
Amy
By Sajal Kayan on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
Hi Amy,
My intention is not to simply insult one product or another, its simply letting my feelings and thoughts out. I use joomla 1.0.x and due to the fact that ive hacked it a little, im unable (or rather too lazy) to upgrade to 1.5. Also note that ive used Drupal 5.7 for this comparison, not the latest and greatest 6.x .
My post might indicate my personal bias towards Drupal due to the simple fact that I personally found it to have all the features and flexibility that I felt was missing in Joomla.
Wordpress is an amazing CMS(or rather blog platform), but since you mentioned SEF urls, i must point out that only Drupal removes the “stop words” like and, of, to, etc from the URI, keeping it as short as possible. No easy way to achieve this in wp, I admit i haven’t looked for a solution also.
I am not a developer in any of these projects, nor am I good at coding. I respect the developers and their hard work, but as a user of these products which are made available to me free of charge, I consider it to be my duty to blog about what I think about them. The developers may or may not use these as tips on what can can be improved in their products.
Joomla is simple to use, maybe if 2 years ago if i had known about Drupal, i would have dropped it due to its complexity and still chosen Joomla.
By Ric Shreves on Mar 28, 2008 | Reply
I tend to agree but don’t forget — improper use of Drupal PathAuto can result in duplicate content URLs as well — you will need to make sure the original “node” URLs are not still accessible, else the spiders are likely to find them.
By Steven 'Sven' Merrill on Apr 2, 2008 | Reply
Ric,
The global redirect module for Drupal 5.x does exactly that, and that functionality has been rolled into Drupal 6 core, such that all content has only one URL. (If /node/6 has been given the URL /about-us, any request for /node/6 will be redirected to /about-us.)
Hope that helps!
Steven ‘Sven’ Merrill
By seo service uk on Jun 22, 2008 | Reply
As we all know traffic is the lifeblood of any public website. You can build it, but making them come is an entirely different story and a science in itself. At the 2007 Las Vegas PubCon there was an Interactive Site Review Session in which webmasters submitted their sites for the panelists to review and critique on SEO techniques. The panel consisted of Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts from Google
By seo consultant uk on Jun 22, 2008 | Reply
I am very grateful for the optimization tip - because I am making more money now - I must say that I was surprised at reading the rest of his E-Book because I already knew everything that was stated in his book (except for his section about writing a great sales letter - I think if you truly have a great product it will sell itself.