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Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, has summarised a fascinating set of events surrounding how Microsoft posted anti Drupal advertising via Google Adwords yesterday. Several of the Drupal community noticed and began Tweeting about it. Before long a firestorm of chat was occurring and Microsoft noticed and reacted in an admirable way considering on the one hand they were trying to compete with Drupal and on the other they positively promote Drupal.

Read More here

This is a video from Matt Cutts of Goolge explaining their policy on indexing sites and handling robots.txt directives.

Getting Flex working with Drupal is relatively straight forward so long as you set up your flex project environment using these following these steps.

Install as3Corelib into the lib directory of your Flex Project

<mx:Script>

        <![CDATA[import these into your flex project using the following actionscript

The imagecache module for Drupal has to be one of the most superb available. Some of the power of imagechace is in the capability to generate on the fly derivative images at a module level.

I just wanted to share this snippet which creates within php or a module an instance of a preset imagecache image.

Once you have clean urls (search engine friendly), meta descriptions, <title> tags, header tags and ensured you have the correct keyword density on your pages what else is there to do?

Enter Siloing / Page Rank Sculpting

Siloing (categorisation) is the process of organising either physically or via use of links your site content into logical subject areas so that you communicate a focused message about the subject areas you cover on your site to the search engines.

There are some useful articles on this subject here

It is possible to prevent valuable page rank weighting from being passed on to pages which you do not need or want to benefit. Examples of these might be your terms and conditions, user login, contact forms. I have found a really good article about how to use the rel=”nofollow” tag to achieve this.

Most web agencies put a credit to themselves in the footer of their client sites. This is a good practice but they often target terms which they already perform well on, their company name. Instead you might want to read this article about alternative anchor text to select.

Use an advanced google search to locate Drupal Websites which allow users to comment with links. The important thing is to search within the context of the term you are optimising for.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22street+furniture%22+environmental+%22Allowed+HTML+tags%3A+%3Ca%3E%22&btnG=Search

I have just tried out the demo of Concrete5 CMS. I can only say from a user experience perspective this CMS is wildly better than any I have seen. I have been using Drupal for 3 years now and must admit that in comparisson it feels a little clunky.

The string overrides module permits string overrides without the complexity of the translation capabilities of Drupal. It would certianly fall into the "I wish I had discovered this module earlier" category.