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Best practices for Pathauto configuration?

laken's picture
Submitted by laken on Thu, 2008-09-04 01:05

I'm developing my first site that makes extensive use of different content types, and I'm really getting into Pathauto for the first time. (Great module btw!) I have no background in SEO, so I'm wondering if experienced Pathauto users would share some of their general approaches to configuring the replacements paths. For example, here are some of my questions:

  • Under Punctuation settings, I'm removing all punctuation except for hyphens, on the theory that punctuation will mess up certain devices / encodings / search engines, and that it's either harmful or at least has no benefit in URLs - correct?

  • Certain punctuation characters (like “, ”, ’ etc) don't appear in the punctuation list, so under General Settings I selected "Reduce strings to letters and numbers from ASCII-96" - that removes those characters, but they are replaced with a hyphen, so "Nebraska’s beauty" turns into "nebraska-s-beauty", which seems weird to me. How would you handle this?

  • Should I just keep the default "Strings to Remove"?

  • Is it okay to use the Raw replacement strings? There's a note: "Use -raw replacements for text to avoid problems with HTML entities." but then each of them has a "WARNING - raw user input. What's the best practice here?

  • I understand having feed aliases for taxonomy paths, but why are they provided for node paths? I was getting lots of paths like article/my-great-article/0/feed automatically generated, so I blanked out the Internal feed alias text for Node paths. Good idea?

So bring it on with your expertise!

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bump

laken's picture
laken - Wed, 2008-09-17 04:37

anyone? Is there a better forum than this to ask this question?


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Your plan looks good. I

earnie's picture
earnie - Wed, 2008-09-17 12:12

Your plan looks good.

I thought the single quote (apostrophe) was one of the list of things to replace. That's the reason it changes from ' to -.

Default strings to remove: is up to you. A title like "The Fox and The Hound" will become /Fox-Hound with the default.

I use the -raw most often but so far my sites have not had interactive user input.

Feed aliases: Because it would be node/%nid/0/feed otherwise and that doesn't match the article/my-great-article. How will the user relate that? I don't think it is a good idea.

Better forum: Well groups, really isn't a forum and there are only 208 members of this group so you'll only get a limited target. Perhaps the support mail list would have been better. Have you looked at http://drupal.org/support?

The replacement character, you left it as the default - (dash); I prefer the _ (underscore) character instead.

Other SEO modules I use: Global Redirect, XML Sitemap


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right on

greggles's picture
greggles - Wed, 2008-09-17 23:24

I thought I'd let other folks weigh in before posting - I guess there's not so much interest in this discussion.

Earnie got most of the answers, I think.

My additional ideas:

The only reason you would want feeds for nodes is if you are using something like http://drupal.org/project/commentrss or have a view that provides the same thing.

I feel that - is better than _ for both usability and SEO.


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