Drupal Tutorials and Blog Posts

This week's tutorial explains how to add metadata to your Drupal site. By default, Drupal has no fields for metadata. Check the source code at http://drupal.org and you'll see what I mean. To fix that issue, we recommend a module called Nodewords.

Installing Nodewords to Your Drupal Site

• Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/nodewords to download the latest version of "Nodewords".
• Step 3: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "nodewords".
• Step 4: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
• Step 5: Upload the "nodewords" folder to /sites/all/modules/
• Step 6: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules. You'll need to check only the first two of the four boxes if you'd like to add regular metadata:

  

• Step 7: Go and create a new node. When you do, you should notice a new area labelled "Meta tags" and you'll be able to add metadata to all your nodes:

  

• Step 8: You can also give the search engines information about how this page should be crawled, by using the "Robots" checkboxes. These are the messages you can send to Google or Yahoo:
  • NOARCHIVE ... don't store a cache version of this page in your search results.
  • NOFOLLOW ... don't give any value to the outbound links on this page.
  • NOINDEX ... don't index this page in search results.
  • NOODP ... don't use any information from DMOZ.org to describe this site.
  • NOSNIPPET ... don't show any of this text on this page in your search results.
  • NOYDIR ... don't use any information from Yahoo Directory to describe this site.

Configuring Nodewords

The default Nodewords settings might not be to everyone's taste. There is no short cut to the Nodewords editing page, unless you to to Administer >> By Module >> Nodewords >> Meta tags. There you can choose global settings for your site's metatdata.