I have understood that duplicate urls for same content may hurt SEO.

I read the pathauto readme.txt and the following part drew my attention:
"There are reasons you might not want two urls for the same content on your site.
If this applies to you, please note that you will need to update any hard coded
links in your nodes or menus to use the alias..."

And also:
"Pathauto just adds url aliases to nodes and taxonomy terms. Because it's an
alias, the standard Drupal url (for example node/123 or taxonomy/term/1) will
still function as normal."

So, I should avoid duplicate urls but I if use pathauto I will get duplicate urls anyway because
mydomain.com/node/10 and mydomain.com/content/some-title will be both pointing to the same page and I can't do anything about it. Or are the duplicate urls "bad" only if inside my site I use links with both names to point to the same page?

Also another question:
I first bulk updated all the pages. Then I realized I want to use transliteration. So I renamed the i18n-ascii-file in pathauto directory. Then I updated my pages again (with the "Create a new alias. Delete the old alias." -option). But despite deleting the old aliases, I can access same page with the url before I enabled transliteration and after I enabled transliteration. Should I be worried about this?

Although there has been a lot of conversation on these issues I found the alias-url-seo thing a bit confusing.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Comments

greggles’s picture

greggles
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Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
CreditAttribution: greggles commented
Title: Pathauto and duplicate urls » Pathauto and duplicate urls (update README.txt with best practices)
Component: Miscellaneous » Documentation
Category: support » task

Well, my initial reaction is that the documentation is bad/wrong so I would like to turn this issue into a task to fix that.

My second reaction is:

1) use the internal alias for menu settings and places like that and Drupal will automatically use the alias that Pathauto created
2) When creating node content you should probably use the alias so you don't have the duplicated URL problem but...
3) If you use the global redirect problem then linking to the "internal path" (i.e. node/3) isn't as much of a problem and...
4) You can/should use the path_redirect module and the new "Update action" of "create a new alias redirect old alias to new alias" which is the best for users/SEO/preventing link rot. However...
5) Note that these recommendations will create a lot of records in the database for the url_alias and path_redirect tables which may slow down your site.

I see this as the basis of the new recommendations for the README.txt Does this help? Anything still confusing?

(please open a new issue for the transliteration item...each issue should be about one topic)

wpanssi’s picture

wpanssi CreditAttribution: wpanssi commented

Hmm..
1) Ok, so just to be sure: internal alias means the alias that pathauto creates, something like content/some-nice-title ?

2) This one I don't get. As I create a page, pathauto automatically creates an alias for it. But I didn't quite get was there something more to it..

4) I use global redirect. Any experiences on that? It seems to me it's about the same as path_redirect, but I don't really know which one is better for SEO..

(And I'll open a separate issue for the transliteration item)

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
CreditAttribution: greggles commented

1) I was using "internal alias" improperly - it should probably be "system path" which is something like "node/123" instead of "content/some-nice-title".

2) I mean that when you put a link in the body of node or block content that you should use the alias "content/some-nice-title"

4) Global redirect just redirects a few scenarios but, most importantly for you, does a 301 redirect from "node/123" to "content/some-nice-title". Path redirect module creates arbitrary forwards - when you install path_redirect and Pathauto you get a new update action to do a redirect from "content/old-title" to "content/new-title"

Does that help explain? I'll be sure to include these clarifications in the README.txt

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
CreditAttribution: greggles commented
Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

For ease of patching, I'm going to combine this with #264909: Update README.txt - How to initially set up Pathauto