I started this as a comment over in the SEO group but I've copied it over here as some of the proposed changes will affect how this site gets used.
This is a wiki page. Please feel free to organize, edit, update and add to this list.
As I'm sure you know it's hard to optimize a site for everything. Some groups do exceptionally well in their search engine rankings. Most sort of suck. It'd be up to the individual groups to "fix" their keywords.
A few (basic) ideas to make the site more accessible to search engines:
- Update URLs to use g.d.o/group-name/nid (yes, this will NOT work nicely for people like me who cross-post to multiple groups)
- Add the Global Redirect module (http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect) so that people can cross post AND have nice URLs.
- Adjust the front page title to put description first and site name second.
- Clicking on the "Groups" primary link tab gives you a keyword-ugly page. Get rid of the columns for user name, "Join" and group count.
- By default on the "Groups" page sort the list according to some kind of "hotness" rating (large groups first? recent post first?)
- Overhaul the layout for the groups page and have instead blocks for: New groups, Popular Working Groups, Popular Regional Groups with "more" links from each of these
- Merge "Event Planning" groups into Geographical or Working Groups as appropriate. Merge "Distribution" groups into "Working Groups." Focus on text based links to each of these groups instead of form-based filters.
- Do we have a site map? We should. http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap
- What are the stats like for http://groups.drupal.org/events ? Is there a better way to present this information without duplicating content? Perhaps just a list of "Upcoming events" instead of a calendar view?
- Replace groups.drupal.org with the Group Name in the page title i.e.
<title>[node-title], [group-name]<title>(see above re. Canonical URLs). - What's the deal with the "site wide tags" on some posts? Instructions are: "Add any tags which you deem relevant for this post. Separate tags with a comma. This data is aggregated across all of groups.drupal.org." The taxonomy term pages adds duplicate content throughout the site and we don't seem to take advantage of the meta data that users are adding to their posts. Other than, "tags are cool" how is this being used? Is it still appropriate? Or are we just risking content duplication with this feature?
Remove the<h1>tag from the list of allowed tags in all Input Formats.- Create a sensible page title and URL alias for "Working Group" and "Geographical" main categories (see mission text suggestions below).
Revised mission text suggestion:
Looking for a meetup, user group or DrupalCamp in your area? Drupal users are active all over the world. Find and participate in your local community in our
<a href="http://groups.drupal.org/og/all?title_oper=contains&title=>_tid[]=141">Geographical Listing of Drupal Groups</a>.Want to find out more about your favorite module, theme, install profile, version control system or workflow problem? Our working groups allow the Drupal community to ask questions, and get help. Find topics of interest in the list of
<a href="http://groups.drupal.org/og/all?title_oper=contains&title=>_tid[]=142">Drupal Working Groups</a>.
I hope that list of suggestions is a useful jumping off point for other ideas as well. :)