Can anyone with experience discuss how well suited sites built with Ruby on Rails tend to be received by search engines? I know it's not necessarily the programming of the code on the site but more the way content is presented to hungry spiders, but in general can anyone say in the short time RoR has been around, how the major SEs have handled their content, and do they rank well?
From what little I know of R on R I believe that it 'encourages' you to develop in an SEO friendly manner it that URL's contain the parameters from which your page is derived. For example, my page on 43things (which is R on R) is at... http://www.43things.com/person/bochgoch ...such 'clean' url's are good practice for a number of reasons, which you can start to read about at http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls ...hope that helps...
Yes this is the sort of thing I was curious about but perhaps I didn't ask the question very well originally. For example, WordPress is often cited as SEO-friendly because it automatically builds your URL of the post with your title keywords in it, and <h2> and <h1> headers are automatically made present where SE's can come by and see them (not a technical explanation but you get the idea). I guess what I am curious about is: are the content management systems that one may find in Ruby on Rails sites known for this sort of behavior?
As it happens I have a blog specifically on the matter. Ruby on Rails is generally very seo-friendly, and it makes doing on page optimisation like clean urls very easy. There are a few things that by default, rails does that can harm your ranking but I am currently confirming those and will post on them in the future.