To take full advantage of Clean URLs, the Pathauto module kicks website optimization into high gear by automatically generating url aliases based on a pattern system that can be custom configured for all content types. Instead of http://www.example.com/node/23, the Pathauto module will convert your url to http://www.example.com/category/my-node-title.htm where category is the taxonomy term associated with the node and the file name is based on the node's title minus predefined stop words.

The Pathauto module requires the path module to be activated which handles the path aliases. This is built into Drupal’s core. The newest version of Pathauto 2.0 also requires the Token module which controls the custom pattern system for the pathauto aliases.

To configure Pathauto, navigate to Administer > Site Configurations > Pathauto.

Under General Settings, keep the default separator as a dash. There has been a long debate over using dash versus underscores in your file structure. According to Jerry West of Web Marketing Now, if your url is http://www.example.com/keyword1_keyword2.htm, Google will only return your page in the results for the search query “keyword1_keyword2”. In other words, Google sees words separated with an underscore as one word instead of two and requires an exact phrase match with the underscore in the search query in order to take advantage of having keywords in your URLs. This is not the case with dashes, as Google sees them as two words. Although it is my understanding that in the near future, underscores will be treated the same as dashes, it is still highly recommended that you use dashes in your file structures.

Don’t check the box for “Create index alias” which will result in Drupal generating additional pages that would be considered duplicate content on your site.

Under Node Path Settings, change the default tokens to [termalias]/[title-raw].htm. The [termalias] token will generate the alias of categories specified below. [title-raw] will generate the file name from your node title and append .htm to the end so that it reads like a standard web file. For example, if I create a page titled “Getting The Most Out Of Drupal For SEO” and tagged it under the category SEO, my url would be http://www.example.com/seo/getting-most-out-drupal-seo.htm, removing the stop words from the title.

You can specify patterns for individual content types and the available tokens are listed under this section.

For the Category Path Settings, change the default to [catpath-raw]. This will generate the alias based on your taxonomy terms and subcategories that you attach to your nodes or pages that you are creating. It is generally best to remove the vocabulary token from the alias pattern because this will add an extra level to your directory structure. Although this won’t hurt your rankings, it does cause a problem with the search engine spiders ability to crawl deeply within your site. It is recommended to go no more than 3-4 levels deep.

If you want to utilize the Pathauto module on an existing site, you will need to delete all the existing aliases and perform a “bulk update” to generate the new aliasing structure. First backup your database. Then navigate to Administer > Site Building > URL Aliases and click on the Delete Aliases tab. Here you can choose which types to delete in bulk. Next, return to the Pathauto settings and check the boxes for “Bulk generate aliases for nodes that are not aliased” under both Node path settings and Category path settings. By default, Pathauto will only generate 50 aliases per content type in a bulk update. You can change this in the General Settings based on your needs and server speed.

A word of caution. If you are implementing these tips on a site that already uses Pathauto, but was configured differently, please take into consideration that if you have links pointing to your old aliases, you will need to perform a 301 redirect to the new ones. So before doing this, carefully decide if it is to your benefit to change your aliases. If the size of your site is extensive, it will be more of a headache than it is worth. Remember, it is only one aspect of improving your SEO. If you move forward, ALWAYS backup your data.

NOTE: See the chart below for setting variations based on the versions of Pathauto and Token you are running.