Clean URLs

Clean, well-formed URLs help search engines understand the content of your pages and improve the user experience. This page walks the Clean URLs group of the SEO checklist: redirects, URL alias patterns, and structured file paths.

Goal

Every item in the Clean URLs group reviewed or completed, and the checklist saved so your progress is recorded.

Prerequisites

• The SEO checklist opened and saved once; see Work through the SEO checklist.
• What a URL alias and a redirect are; see SEO essentials.

Steps

Open the checklist at Configuration → Search and metadata → SEO Checklist/admin/config/search/seo-checklist and work down the Clean URLs group.

Review Redirect module permissions

Every Drupal CMS site template installs and enables the Redirect module, so this item is already complete. The module automatically redirects visitors from outdated or changed URLs to their current location, preventing broken links and helping search engines update their results. When a URL alias is updated manually, a redirect is created to the content’s current alias.

Use the item’s Configure permissions link to review which user roles have permission to create redirects.

Configure the Redirect module

Use the item’s Configure link to verify or update the default settings. For most sites, the defaults are appropriate. To add or manage redirects later, go to Configuration → Search and metadata → URL redirects/admin/config/search/redirect.

Watch for 404s with Redirect 404

This item is an ongoing maintenance task rather than a one-time setup. The Redirect 404 module keeps a list of “404: Not Found” URLs accessed by visitors (a 404 error occurs when a requested page cannot be found, named for the HTTP status code). You can then create redirects for the URLs that matter and ignore the rest.

• Use the item’s Configure link to view the list of “not found” pages and add redirects where appropriate.
• Settings for both Redirect and Redirect 404 live at Configuration → Search and metadata → URL redirects → Settings/admin/config/search/redirect/settings. The defaults work well for most sites.

Review Pathauto permissions

Drupal CMS includes the Pathauto module and installs it during initial setup, so this item is complete. Pathauto generates clean, meaningful URL aliases for your content: for example, /wine-tours-in-oregon as an alias of /node/42. Both URLs point to the same page, but the alias is the preferred, canonical one.

Use the item’s Configure permissions link to review which user roles can perform tasks related to Pathauto and URL aliases.

Review Pathauto settings

Use the item’s Configure link to review how Pathauto generates and updates aliases. The defaults are usually adequate. One setting worth knowing about is transliteration: swapping accented and other non-ASCII letters for their ASCII equivalents. Because aliases come from content titles by default, and URLs only support ASCII characters, transliteration keeps titles with accents from producing broken aliases.

Review URL alias patterns

All built-in content types ship with URL alias patterns pre-defined. Review the patterns before you start creating content so your URLs stay consistent, organized, and SEO-friendly.

A pattern can include URL-safe characters such as a slash (/), a hyphen (-), letters a-z, numbers 0-9, and tokens. A token is a dynamic placeholder, surrounded by square brackets, that is replaced by an entity-specific value: [node:title] stands for the title of the content.

1. Review the existing patterns for the built-in content types. Select Edit from the Operations dropdown to make changes.
2. For a custom content type, pick a pattern from another content type, select Duplicate from the Operations column, then edit the pattern as appropriate.

Optional: structured file paths

The File (Field) Paths module is for special cases: sites that regularly upload images or documents and need structured, consistent paths like /files/articles/[title]/image.jpg. If your site needs that, download and install the module, then use the checklist item’s Configure link to set up patterns for file field paths.

Verify

• Create or edit a content item: its URL alias is generated from the title, not a /node/14258 style address.
• In the checklist, the Clean URLs group shows the module items toggled on, and your manually completed items carry a saved date.

Related

• Work through the SEO checklist anchors this sequence.
• Next in the checklist: Meta tags.
• SEO essentials explains why clean URLs matter.