Recently a junior colleague of mine started working on a project with Drupal. Nobody in our shop has used Drupal before, and so he frequently hits Google for debugging help. A typical Google search might look like
drupal "some php or mysql error message i just got"Today I was trying to lend a hand debugging some issues he couldn't get his head around, and was struck by the number of non-Drupal-related Stack Overflow results I got for Google searches that began with the word drupal. My colleague has also complained to me that when searching for help with some error he's encountered in the context of Drupal development, he'll often get Stack Overflow results from non-Drupal contexts before he gets to better, Drupal-related content. Searching for drupal collations, for example, gives me a Stack Overflow link about MySQL collations with no Drupal context at all on the front page.
It took a while for it to occur to me that the problem might be stuffing of irrelevant keywords via the footer. After all, from Google's perspective, isn't every single page on Stack Overflow at least a little bit Drupal-related?
I don't have any data to back up this idea - only a vague hunch - so I ask more SEO-literate users to forgive me if my hunch is nonsense. But is it? And if not, does the careers sidebar (which may similarly be full of deceptive keywords) contribute to the same effect? And if Stack Overflow were to stop serving the footer and careers pane to the Googlebot, would it help Googlers get more relevant results and boost the SEO of the smaller computing- or development-related Stack Exchange sites whose keywords SOisstuffingintoeverypageviathefooter?
