Drupal SEO alert - issue with Meta Tags (nodewords) module and robots option

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Posted by laken on September 9, 2010 at 10:45pm

Since several people in our group are interested in SEO they may be running the Drupal Meta Tags module (http://drupal.org/project/nodewords). Apparently there is an issue in the module where, if certain config options are set, it will completely exclude your site from Google! Here's what my colleague Owen Barton just sent out about this:

Just a quick note for anyone configuring the meta tags module - it appears that if you enable robots tag support, the default configuration will add noindex,nofollow to listing pages (but it's detection of a listing page seems to be somewhat faulty, so it could end up doing it on all pages). This just happened to us on civicactions.com (unfortunately on all pages). To fix, simply uncheck the robots checkbox. I think the reasoning behind this "feature" is to prevent the "duplicate content penalty", however the "duplicate content penalty" is pretty much non-existent unless you are actually running blatant link-farms or clone sites - see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicat... for more details. Obviously the penalty for not having any pages indexed at all is much higher :)

A little searching turned up this issue in that module's queue: http://drupal.org/node/786270

So in short, for now, if you use that module, uncheck the 'robots' checkbox or you may be hiding your site from the search engines!