What are the most common SEO issues with Sharepoint?

Question

As far as I know Microsoft SharePoint does not provide many "out of the box" essential features to enable good performance in the search engines. Here are the main issues I found:

1. Little control over the length and structure of the URL.

2. Default redirections 302 (temporary) redirects instead of 301 (permanent).

3. The standard version of SharePoint 2007 creates pages with URLs like this: /Pages/Thisisatestpageinsharepoint2007.aspx. This URL structure has poor usability. A better URL would look like: /test-page-sharepoint-2007.aspx.

4. By default SharePoint will create the URL based on the title page. This can be a problem from a SEO perspective becasue the content of a page could always change but the structure of URLs should always be persistent.

5. SharePoint does not support the automated creation and updating of XML Sitemap

6. You can not add custom meta tags such as <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> to control searche engines robots.

To overcome some of these problems you can install and configure specialized plugins or extensions. Other problems may require a more complex customization of the application code.

Do you know if the current version of SharePoint still have those issue and if there are other SEO issues I should aware of?

Answer 1

It looks like SharePoint hasn't addressed most, if not all, of the issues you listed. Although it does look like addressing them yourself seems to be easier in II7. Also, have you seen the SEO Toolkit? It seems to addresses some of the issues you mentioned as well.

Other issues that still seem to exist that I found from some google searches:

• Pages can be accessed from multiple URLs. This will result in duplicate content issues.
• Lots of JavaScript is loaded. This will cause your pages to load slowly. Page speed is a ranking factor for Google (albeit a small one).
• Sharepoint does not produce valid HTML code. This may result in crawling errors.

FYI, StackExchange does have a Sharepoint Q&A site in beta. Someone even asked a SharePoint SEO question.