I am trying to evaluate whether or not to convert my existing site over to XOOPS and have a few concerns that I would like to get some feed back on to help me make that decision…

My site is very large, approaching a thousand html pages……. Most of the site is informational but there are approximately 50 or so pages that I try my best to promote thru the search engines and they individual page ranking under their category is important to me….

Since it appears to me at this early stag that the information, i.e. Titles… Meta tag info ect remain the same when switching from page to page in XOOPS that my page rankings for those individual categories my suffer…

If anyone has any info or input on this subject, I sure would appreciate it…

Thanks for your time,
Russ

I'm no expert on this issue, so don't take what I say as gospel.

Personally, I feel that the contribution XOOPS makes to content management far outweighs that of the search engine optimisations that you achieve by having 'traditional' html pages. The time you save by using XOOPS you can use to optimise your rankings in oter way, for example, by adding yet more content that the engines like!!

I do agree however that, for example, if you were making a site about chocolate bars, you do better on the engines by having the content in a folder called \chocolate\ and an html page called 'chocloate.html' and then by having that full of text relating to..mmm....chocloate, you're gonna do well on Google. Especially if the site is called 'cholcoate.com!' I agree that XOOPS does not allow such naming (that I am aware of) and therefore some XOOPS sites may suffer a little compared to their pure html equivalents.

But, like I said earlier, the CM advantages far outweigh this, in my view, and you'll have so much extra time to find the info you want in your site and the engines will lap it up.

There is a module called (theme changer) thats located in the module repository. Your able to set metas and title per module. If you create your own modules being very specific you will still achive what your looking for.

There is a free module generator and I will find the link for you. All you need to do is add content to them. Then inside (theme changer) give the words that make your site rank well...

THere has been a lot of discussion about this in the forums, I can only suggest you search for the posts with keywords like google, ranking, S/E, shorturl.

I was in the same position as you a while back and I went for the plunge as I was tired of tacking bits of scripts onto my html site.

I must say my ranking for Google has not changed since being with Xoops, but my other SE ranking is virtually non existant. Due to XOOPS using DB and therefore query strings in deep URLs, many Search engines simply wont crawl your site. Read articles on CMS watch and see what they say about this. Of course Google serves many other minor Search engines also.

Having said that many XOOPS users run very successful commercial ventures with this CMS.

There are some useful tricks we can use: Look for the shorturl hack that rewrites URLs into friendly addresses. Theme changer module that allows you to add module specific meta data.

We are not yet able to write meta data on a page by page basis yet. If thats important to you, be aware.

Search the forums ...

You can make specific modules with the name of your keywords here.

http://www.worldware.com/modules/xoopermod/

Add your content to the module then use (theme changer) for
final touches...

Thanks to All.... I will look at this stuff and report back what I find/think....

I really want to do this but I want to do it right.... not to mention the learning curve involved....

Russ

Thanks to All.... I will look at this stuff and report back what I find/think....

I really want to do this but I want to do it right.... not to mention the learning curve involved....

Russ