Home

Global Redirect Module

8 August 2007 - 1:18pm — Drupalzilla

The Global Redirect module has three main features:

If a requested URL has a URL alias, Global Redirect will do a 301 redirect to the URL alias.
For example, if you have a URL alias for node 25 called page-title, the Global Redirect Module will do a 301 redirect from http://example.com/node/25 to http://example.com/page-title.
It will remove trailing slashes from URLs.
For example, the Global Redirect Module will redirect a request for http://example.com/page-title/ to http://example.com/page-title. If search engines spider both versions, they will see two different URLs with duplicate content.
If a requested URL is being used as Drupal's front page, it will 301 redirect to the actual front page.
For example, if you are using the path frontpage as your site's front page, a request for http://example.com/frontpage will 301 redirect to http://example.com/.

If you search around the Web for Drupal SEO tutorials, many people recommend using mod_rewrite rules in an .htaccess file to deal with issues like removing trailing slashes. But on sites that also have non-Drupal content, you may have URLs that do have trailing slashes.

A slash is the symbol for a directory. For example, in the URL http://example.com/ the trailing slash is the symbol for the root directory of example.com. If you leave the trailing slash off, the server will add it. If you request a physical directory on a Drupal site (or any site) like http://example.com/modules the server will correct you by appending the trailing slash: http://example.com/modules/. If you have non-Drupal content on your server—perhaps a WordPress blog at http://example.com/software/—you will have URLs with trailing slashes. The WordPress blog would not be located at http://example.com/software, it would be located at http://example.com/software/. You would not want to remove trailing slashes from all URLs.

That is why the Global Redirect module is a good option. It will only remove trailing slashes from URLs that are handled by Drupal.

Module Information
Module Name:
Global Redirect
Version:
5.x-1.1
Project Page:
http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
SEO Issues:
This is a standard SEO module that should go on most sites
This module has uses specific to SEO
Average: 5 (1 vote)