Another one of the best Drupal modules for improving your site’s SEO is Path Redirect. For as small and simple as this module is, it packs a pretty powerful punch, and it can also provide you with a custom solution to a service that is widely used in today’s social networking scene.
The path redirect module does exactly what it sounds like, creates 301 redirects for your site. Instead of opening up the htaccess file in your favorite text editor and spitting out a couple lines for some rewrites, you can simply visit your site’s path redirect settings page and enter in your two URLs. That’s it. You now have a simple way of creating those annoying 301 redirects, with a nice little UI from your site’s admin panel.
Path redirect doesn’t stop there. It can be integrated with pathauto to automatically create 301’s if a page on your site ever has its URL adjusted. Now you don’t have to worry about incoming traffic from backlinks and search engine results being served a 404 error page; Drupal handles your 301 redirects for you through path redirect.
One last, not so common use for path redirect, and why I think it’s one of the best Drupal modules for SEO, is that you can use it to create custom tiny URLs. A very commonly used service nowadays is Tiny URL generation to shorten URL paths for micro blogging services such as Twitter, Digg, and Identi. Once you create your piece of content, you can setup a custom redirect to that page using path redirect. For instance, I setup tiny URLs to my blog posts by creating URL redirects with a letter and the node ID of my post. Instead of trying to post a URL into Twitter that looks like http://www.matowens.com/blog/professional/top-7-drupal-seo-modules-you-s..., I simply create a redirect URL that looks like this http://matowens.com/t/10 with a target of node/10. You can choose any format you want for these URLs too. I have chosen to use t/[nodeID] because I won’t have any conflicts with other pieces of content since there are no pages that have a ‘t/’ on my site and every piece of content (node) in Drupal has its own unique ID.
Path redirect can automate your redirect process, save you from losing hard earned backlinks and indexing, and provide you with a quick way to create your very own tiny URL’s based off of your own domain name. Clearly path redirect is one of the best Drupal modules out there, and I better not find out your site’s not using it!
URL: http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect
Admin: /admin/build/path-redirect