If for some reason you must take down your site or just a few pages temporarily for maintenance, moving servers, or whatever reason, you need to tell the search engines that this is TEMPORARY. Otherwise, they will see the page is not there (404 status/response code) and drop your site or page from their search index.

I'm approaching 20 blog articles and I haven't yet made a backup of my Drupal site. YIKES! It would suck if my hosting server crashed and I lost everything. So... I guess I should do it now.

The point of this site is Drupal SEO and, yet, I haven't yet optimized a page for that term (although those individual words do show up in other node titles but not the exact phrase). So, this will be another experiment to see how high I can rank for that exact phrase.

I was checking out my Google Analytics statistics for kristen.org since I'm curious how people get to the site and what they are typing into the search engines. I was surprised to see that I actually get some traffic here from people typing in my name (kristen). Of course, my domain has kristen in it and my home page has it in the <title> tag, so the word does show up a bit. My site is actually in the top 20 in google for that keyword!

This article discusses how to use the Drupal node teaser for better SEO. I have used the "split cursor at summary" feature and unchecked the "show summary in full view" checkbox in order to get the teaser you are reading to be different than the first part of the node body text.

The Drupal pathauto module is great but be careful how you configure it. The recommended settings are already chosen by default but let's review them below. To get to the Drupal pathauto URL aliases settings, go to: Administer > Site Building > URL Aliases (admin/build/path/pathauto).

The Drupal statistics module keeps track of how many times a node has been viewed. The statistics module is an optional core module so just turn it on and it will start keeping track of your node views. It stores the data in the node_counter table and keeps track of daily views and total views.

I recently added Google AdSense ads to this site to see what the click-through-rate will be. I wanted to put a banner ad above the content section you are reading right now in addition to side blocks. Since I'm using the bluemarine theme, there was not a way to put blocks into the section above the main content, so I modified the bluemarine theme to make this happen.

I've had this site up for awhile with some blog content so I'm going to see what happens if I put up some Google ads. It will be an interesting experiment. I'm certainly not going to get rich, but I'm getting some traffic so maybe I'll get enough clicks to pay for my hosting plan (or to upgrade to so my site is faster! :).

I checked on my kristen.org site after some absence only to find a bunch of spammy comments in my Drupal comments approval queue. I've been slowly adding new modules to the site and trying to write about what I'm adding along the way. Well, I forgot to add in Captcha so I ended up with the spam. So for those that want to reduce spam on their site: