Chapter 9. Taking Control of Your Content

It's time to take control of your content. How your site is organized, and how all of the content links together, is very important to your standing with the search engines. Making sure your content is well structured and doesn't violate any HTML best practices, is another way to show that your site is the best. Also, making sure there aren't links on your site to bad neighborhoods (gambling, porn, Viagra, hate, and so on) will ensure that you aren't penalized in the search engines results. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Using OpenCalais to tag and organize your content

• Bulk processing your content with OpenCalais

• Creating More Like This blocks to help visitors and the search engines know more about your site

• Keeping your content compliant with the HTML Purifier module

• Blocking spam with the Mollom module

Using OpenCalais to tag and organize your content

Suppose you've got hundreds of pages of content on your site and you haven't been...

Using OpenCalais to tag and organize your content

Suppose you've got hundreds of pages of content on your site and you haven't been doing a very good job so far of categorizing everything. Or, perhaps you have a lot of users creating posts every day, and it's too much trouble to train everyone or go back through and tag everything that's created. Well, there's an automated solution called OpenCalais (also known as Calais) that will do the heavy lifting for you.

• OpenCalais reads in the content of your nodes, as you create them, or in bulk

• OpenCalais uses some amazing analysis to create tags for your content

• OpenCalais creates tags in your Drupal Taxonomies so you can use them to organize your content

OpenCalais is not perfect. It only tags three major types of data:

1. 1. Named entities: People, companies, organization, geographies, books, albums, authors, and so on.

2. 2. Facts: Position, alliance, person-education, person-political, and so on.

3. 3. Events: Sporting, management change, IPO, labor action...

Keeping content compliant with the HTML Purifier module

Suppose you've run the W3C check and there are some problems with user-created content (You'd never make mistakes, would you?). You can easily fix it by editing the node, but how do you keep more issues from cropping up over time? The answer is the HTML Purifier module. This module utilizes a program called HTML Purifier that does several things to keep your code clean. It will:

• Remove malicious code with a secure yet permissive whitelist

• Make sure your documents are standards compliant

The HTML Purifier module is maintained by Edward Z. Yang. Thanks!

Carry out the following steps to install and configure it:

1. 1. Download the HTML Purifier module from the following link, http://www.drupal.org/project/htmlpurifier and install just like a normal Drupal module, but don't activate it yet. Refer to Chapter 1, The Tools You'll Need, for step-by-step module installation instructions.

2. 2. Download the HTML Purifier module from http://www.htmlpurifier...

Preventing spam

User comments are some of the best content that you have on your site as far as the search engines are concerned. They reinforce the ideas already on the page and the best thing of all is that you didn't need to lift a finger for someone to add value to your web site.

However, user comments introduce a whole set of problems called Comment Spam. Just because you have a web site, some users will use it as their own little playground for creating links back to anywhere they want. Fortunately, there is a terrific, and mostly automatic, service for preventing spam called Mollom. Mollom was created by Benjamin Schrauwen and Dries Buytuart (Recognize that name? He's the founder of Drupal!). Thanks guys, you've got a winner here!

Mollom is a web service that identifies comment quality and helps stop spam on your Drupal web site. Drupal web sites using Mollom send form submissions (comments, posts, and so on) that they want checked to http://www.mollom.com. Mollom then replies with...

Summary

Remember, you are in charge when it comes to the content on your Drupal site. That means that you should be leveraging every bit of content on your site to the fullest while protecting your valuable site assets from the bad guys.

In this chapter, we have covered:

• Using OpenCalais to tag and organize your content

• Bulk processing your content with OpenCalais

• Creating More Like This blocks to help visitors and the search engines know more about your site

• Keeping your content compliant with the HTML Purifier module

• Blocking spam with the Mollom module

Great content will get people to your site and even keep them there. But will they do what you want them to? The next chapter is all about increasing your conversion rate.