Controlling URLs

If you have played around with Drupal a little, you have probably noticed how strange the URLs of your pages look. They will be something like

/?q=node/17

This looks odd, many people would say a little ugly, and it is non-intuitive for users. Even if you don't have a problem with that, these strange URLs can affect your site traffic:

• You probably want other sites to link to you (most of us do, it brings in traffic). However, some webmasters might be put off by these odd URLs, perhaps suspecting that they are nefarious or incorrect. This may mean they decide not to link to you.
• If a website does link to you, having these unusual URLs increases the possibility of a keying error when the link is set up. If they link to /q=node/17 rather than /?q=node/17, it will fail.
• Search engines usually take the URL into account when ranking pages. If a page on our website is a recipe for egg fried rice, it is better for the URL to include egg-fried-rice, rather than node/17.
• Some search engines reject links with a ? character. The search engine won't look past your front page, and so will not list any of your content. (In fact, these days, this isn't a problem for most of the big search engines, but may be a problem for small specialised engines).

In this section we will learn how to:

• Clean up the URL syntax.
• Create relevant URLs for special pages (such as the contact page).
• Automatically create relevant URLs for bulk content (eg the recipes on cookiewiki.com).