Dear James Neill
Moodle installations can be set to be open to google at a site level. See the setting "opentogoogle:" in the variables page
moodle/admin/config.php
As to which is more appropriate. Plone, or Mambo and Typo3 are better than moodle at some things. Please see this thread.
Do you need user authentication, tracking, testing or grading? Do you need any of the many learning activities that Moodle provides? If you already have your content in a network of html files and student activitiy does not need to be tracked, or administered, then perhaps a CMS would be your best bet. Moodle does a lot more than put up content and allow people to move through it.
If you are happy with your materials as they are then perhaps Moodle is overkill. If you plan to develop your materials more in the future, then Moodle is the way to go, forward.
And, if it is good enough for the OU, you'll be sure to like it too!
Tim
My concern is that it is not open to Yahoo and MSN. I've tried to mess around with the code to get it to do this but haven't succeeded. I filed this as bug 3278 some time ago but no one has fixed it yet. If anyone knows how to do this, I'd appreciate it.
What do you mean by 'group' when you say 'this isn't configurable on a group by group basis'?
The descriptive text for the opentogoogle option that Timothy mentioned says this:
If you enable this setting, then Google will be allowed to enter your site as a Guest. In addition, people coming in to your site via a Google search will automatically be logged in as a Guest. Note that this only provides transparent access to courses that already allow guest access.
So Google access is first allowed by the admin changing this setting to 'yes' and then decided on a course by course basis by the 'course creator' or 'teacher' opening the course to guest access.
You might also want to try the Google search box on the very front page on Moodle.org and notice the kind of results it gives.
See also the other current discussion of the same topic.
SEO
site Pages should have UNIQUE page titles, a method for entering meta keywords and meta description as well as well written interesting content.
Moodle fails on this point
SEF URls
SEF URLs help dynamic sysyems like Moodle to provide search engines friendly URLs using several methods to rewrite the index.php?var1=1&var2=2 etc
into a more friendly url
site.com/course_name/lesson_name/lesson_1.html
methods used are mod_rewrite , look back and php gen pages
of these 3 mod_rewrite is the coolest IMHO if your server has it installed and enabled.
Moodle fails on this point
Ive searched the forums and can see this is a debated topic but realisticaly simply writing excellent content is NOT enough... to make sure your site is playing on the same level playing field as others in your sector or industry SEO must be a paramount concern. Providng unique page titles for each page is a google requirement
turning long variable ridden URLs into something more friendly that "looks" like a static html page is necessary. being able to set meta keywords and meta descriptions for EACH page is mandatory to having a site that will climb the rankings.
Having said all that any developer interested in working on a SEO/SEF URLs mod for Moodle should contact me to discuss development of a module to do this and negotiate an amount to create the module.
Kinetic
I agree. I'm a bit surprised sometimes that moodle has ignored a lot of things that are important to the web surfer and webmaster. Most folks explain it away by sticking to the purpose of moodle being for teaching. That would work if it weren't online. Taking it online means that in addition to needing a strong environment for teaching, it also has to address the web functionality aspect as well.
Search engine friendly URLs and meta site descriptions and keywords are a must and heavily effect one's ability to use online marketing tools to promote the site. One almost has to put up a front so to speak to work around this. Like put up a Joomla front end that is focused on the online learning through moodle and provides a doorway to the moodle site. One shouldn't have to do that but that's where we are at with this.
There are other things that aren't in line with an effective web surfing environment. It's just not all about the teaching. I have designed many websites and the web building community, teaching community and developer community need to huddle up and see what we can do as a group.
For instance, the languages need to be a block. I'm not sure why this was never made into a block but it needs to be. So you can add it in a spot that makes sense to a user.
The "you are not logged in" or " you are logged in as XX" needs to be added to the login module, where it makes sense. If one is not logged in, the login block will show and when you are logged in, a logout button or link is displayed in the user menu block.
Also we need an ability to create individual pages for things not related to teaching or a course. Yes like the CMS add-on but the issues I found with the CMS add-on is that it does not create it's own pages. It just adds to the ones already there. Like for instance, you can create a course and create and html page that is it's own page. I like that but that page always shows up as a link in the middle. That's ok for courses but one also has to think of the administrative side of running an online teaching environment. Would'nt one need an "about us" page, or "Frequently asked Questions" page that is outside of and independent of the courses? Definitely. So you get the CMS add-on for this, and it forces the pages to come up right in the middle of your nicely designed site pushing your course listings down... It would be nice if the CMS could create new pages with the side bars just like the "create web page" feature inside the courses that is standard with moodle. Or this create webpage feature should be available for creating admin pages. I had to create a whole course just to tell people about my company and policies.
But over all I would like to see the meta data and SEFs. These things are so important for using search engines to promote your site.
(they sure dont like competition do they....)
Kinetic
I've had a Moodle site for 1.5 years and while it is "educational" it is a business not a university and so search engines performance is important to me and I can tell you that the lack of metatags is of NO consequence whatsoever. It has been known for years by the search engines that metatags aren't reliable and they don't look at them. If you want people to find your site, then put relevant content on your pages and the search engines will find it. My experience is that the search engines play closer attention to the page title that you see in the title bar than anything else. And even if you have relevant metatags, what can you do to guarantee that you get to the top of the listings for those tags? If yours is a new site, chances are you will never get to the top of the searches that people make for the main subject of your site because other sites took those spots years ago. I have good traffic on my site from search engines, but I can tell you that only a single digit percentage of it comes from people searching for things that are directly relevant to the main topic of my site; most of the traffic comes from searches on more obscure terms that occur in my forum posts, especually if they occur in the subject of the posts. It's all the rage these days, but the long tail of searching is really effective in bringing in the traffic. Be one of the first sites to have page with a new and breaking term in the news or in people's interests and you will get great traffic on that page because it will be one of the first one the search engine catches. That's something I have seen on my site. I have found that page rank and links are nowhere near as important as being the first site with a term on page and frequent changes to the page as well are important. Google likes old stuff and it likes fresh stuff.
It can take a bit of time, but if you have active forums you will find that soon enough Google will be crawling your Moodle site very quickly after there are new posts and will rank them high.
See this example. This discussion started on my site on August 29 and has been a hot topic among my participants and the next day it had been crawled by Google which continues to crawl it (the last time being about half an hour ago) and now is the top result of 88,800 results. If that isn't good search engine results I don't know what is.
In short, this isn't 1997 anymore and Moodle is not 1997 software and the search engine companies aren't stuck in 1997 looking at metatags either. If you have good site content you will find the search engines have no trouble driving traffic your way with or without the meta tags.
A Fud squishing and informing post all in one, thanks for that bit of understanding. (I've avoided adding an emoticon as I know you don't like them)
I'm new to all this, how can you tell from the logs that you've been crawled?
Thanks
Rich
you can always suggest a new feauture or improvement over at tracker
cheers, Chad
Did anyone respond? I'm wondering the same thing
You can add the tags in the /moodle/theme/~/header.html file. This will put the tags in every page.It's also an easy place to put your ad code.
As to SEO I'm just getting started with site maps. The googlesitemp-generator seemed like a good route but the performance hit on my server was a bit much. I went with perl-sitemap. Use a cron job and allow it to access lots of access.log files.
I have to Set Meta Keywords for my moodle 1.9 Site, How do you add metatags to your frontpage for search engine optimisation? I don't know the file I am supposed to edit. Can anyone help?
ok i am thinking