Pathauto and friendly URLs format?
I am a new drupal user and I just installed pathauto in drupal 6.X. I have multiple questions regarding to how to best generate node URLs and how the URLs patterns affect the performance of drupal 6.x.
I currently have a couple options for friendly URLs (examples below):
1. mywebsite.com/post/3234/my-first-artitle-title
2. mywebsite.com/post/my-first-article-title
3. mywebsite.com/my-first-article-title-3224.html
Out of the three formats above, which one would provide best performance for pathauto & drupal in case mywebsite grow to millions of nodes?
Would option 3 give better performance (faster page load) compare to the other 2 options?
Also, which option would provide best SEO?
Please share your experience or solution if you have one!
Thanks,
John - Goofy Duffy
...
This is not really my area so much but I'll give you my experience.
If nothing exists at mywebsite.com/post/ or mywebsite.com/post/3234/ you're going to get many 404 errors. From looking at my logs I see a number of SE bots that traverese the URL hitting those non-hackable componants and triggering a 404 (because nothing actually exists there) - this has got to impact on performance with a site with millions of pages. It does with our site, and we only have 75 000 nodes.
In more recent sites we've strickly followed the practice of hackable urls, where each part acts like a sub-directory - 404's are way down on these sites and I would think our sites are more effectivley spidered.
If I can get away with it, for nodes I prefer mywebsite.com/my-first-article-title, but if your going for Google News you need a 4 digit number somewhere in there, such as mywebsite.com/my-first-article-title-1234
The .html is pointless IMO and just wreaks of security by obscurity.
Its a good question you ask and not to be taken lightly in the beginning, you need to consider the long term ramifications, the sites structure and how you might want to use the URL in other ways, such as Views arguements.
Thank you for your
Thank you for your interesting response, especially the 404 error part. Now that I have another question regarding performance of pathauto/the drupal site as a whole when it comes to using URL structures as below:
1. mywebsite.com/my-first-article-title-1234 and
1. mywebsite.com/my-first-article-title
Would the lookup time using pathauto the same for both URLs?
My thought is that option 1 would be faster because the URL has node id (i.e 1234) in it? I am just guessing here.
Thank you in advance,
John Goofy
The internal URL has little
The internal URL has little to do with the alias in this regard - both of your examples are just alias's. Performance is going to be the same I would think.
Thank you your response.
Thank you your response. That was really helpful.