Essential Drupal: Global Redirect Module

The Global Redirect module ensures that we will have the best possible technical output from Drupal for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  It is available for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, and it looks like they have been hard at work building it for Drupal 8.

For years, the best practice for any site is to make the URLs keyword rich and friendly so the user knows what to expect when they visit.  So we change Drupal's "Clean URL" settings from jimbir.ch?q=node/27 to jimbir.ch/node/27 and then we change Pathauto's settings from jimbir.ch/node/27 to jimbir.ch/blog/essential-drupal-global-redirect-module.

What we are missing is that those original URLs still remain live on the internet, and can be considered duplicate content, a detriment to good SEO.  Global Redirect automatically sets up 301 Redirects for both of the old URL schemes, to the new friendly URL.

The same goes for the trailing slash.  This module removes (or adds if you so choose) the trailing slash, so there will be only one canonical URL living between jimbir.ch/page and jimbir.ch/page/

The last big option is the home page.  In Drupal's Site Information, we set which node we want as the site's homepage.  Global Redirect makes sure that we only have one page indexed, rather than jimbir.ch and jimbir.ch/home.

There are quite a few more options that can be configured at:

/admin/config/system/globalredirect

This is a simple set and forget module that can really cleanup your url structure for SEO and should be considered for your Essential Drupal!