Drupal Pathauto – Optimal URL Pattern Settings

Drupal – out of the box, has URL’s that form patterns such as this: node/1234 , user/53, and taxonomy/term/27.  So if you write your very first article, the URL to that article will look like this: www,example.com/node/1.  Now, I’m not particularly thrilled with such an URL, as it’s not very descriptive for the search engines.  Fortunately, Drupal also allows you to overwrite those default URL’s with something that’s quite a bit more descriptive.  These are known in Drupalese* as ‘URL Aliases’.  By installing the optional Pathauto module, you can automatically generate URL’s based on your Pathauto configuration patterns.

So here at BurningKnife, my ‘node/1′ is actually “www,burningknife.com/page/191/about-me” – which you might more reasonably guess what it contains than if you ran across “www,burningknife.com/node/1″.  I could equally rename it, if I thought anyone really cared, to include my name – so that search engine results would locate the page if you searched for my name.  The power you have to rename URL’s is a dream come true for SEO purposes!
Another example, take a look at these two identical URL’s (They both point to the same page on my site)

www‚burningknife.com/node/2

www,burningknife.com/article/192/fundamental-basics-earning-money-online.

Now which do you think is better fodder for the search engine spiders?  You guessed it!  The second URL contains keywords, which is always a help when it comes to search engines.

Here are my actual URL patterns that I currently use:

You may have noticed that I have /[dd][nid]/ in the middle – which is not a default for Drupal ‘out-of-the-box’.  I’ve known that there are times when it’s desireable to have at least a three digit number in the URL (It’s a Google News thing).  I also realized to my horror that I would never be able to duplicate a title – it would create the same URL to the best of my knowledge (Any Drupal masters out there with better information?)  So I decided to force everything to be unique.  I put the [nid], which is Drupal’s ‘node id’ – a fancy Drupalese term meaning it’s unique numbered designation for a webpage.  But because it starts at ’1′, and I wanted at least three digits, I tossed in the [dd] date, which is always padded into a two digit number by Drupal.  This means that if I want to do an article titled “The Best Hosting Package” a year or two from now – it won’t conflict with my first article by the same name – since it will have a different date of composition, and a different node number.

I didn’t like using “story” to refer to my articles, so I changed that… Other than these changes, it’s pretty much the default as it comes out of the box. Drupal makes SEO work so easy!

There are some exellent articles on SEO for Drupal – be sure to Google for them and read how to set up your Drupal website for the best SEO practices – once your site is a few months or years old, you won’t want to change things.  (Or you’d lose all your search engine placement!)

Hope this helps anyone trying to put together a Drupal site – I know I spent hours trying to figure out what URL patterns would be optimal – and these are the settings I came up with.
(*Drupalese – I thought that this would be my own modest contribution to the Drupal community – but someone has beaten me to it!  Drupal often uses an esoteric language that only true Drupal masters can decipher and use… things like ‘Taxonomy”, “Vocabulary”, “CCK”, “Node”, “Views”, and so forth.  It takes awhile to master the new language, but it’s fun!)

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