Drupal 7 Global Redirect Module

Welcome to another Daily Dose of Drupal, today we are on Episode number 9 and we will be going over the Drupal Global Redirect module. Last time we talked about the Drupal 7 Redirect module and how that can be helpful for some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons and we’re also going to today look at the Global Redirect module and see how that can also helps with your website’s SEO.
So the first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to just look at out test site here and you can see that we have this test page that we had the last time, the URL is test-page2. However; because the way Drupal handles its system URL s, if I go node/12 I get to this same page and you can find out the content’s Node ID, if you hover over the Edit and you look down here at the bottom corner it says node/12/edit.

So if I go to node/12/edit it brings me to the Node Edit page or if I just go to node/12 it brings me to the Node View page which is the same of course as test-page2. So what can happen is it is possible for the search engine to index a page twice using the Node Page and the actual URL alias that you set up.

So just to make sure that’s prevented we can use the Global Redirect module but you can see what the Global Redirect module does … I mean you can read this I suppose but it’ll do things just to make sure that all your URL across your site are accessed in a consistent way so there’s only one true URL to get to a specific page.

So we’re going to go ahead and download that and now that it’s downloaded we’ll come back here and go to our modules page and we will scroll down and find the Global Redirect module which is right here and you can see that it stops duplicate content as the main goal of Global Redirect. So now that it’s enabled we’ll go back to our homepage, you can see if we go to node/12 now, you’ll see how the URL now changed, if I add a slash at the end you’ll notice that it takes that URL out. So it’s a very simple module and it only does one thing but it does it very well.

It’ll make sure that there’s zero chance that a Search Engine is going to find duplicate Drupal node content on your site and it’s going to make sure that URL’s are only accessible through one Specific unique URL rather than through multiple URLs which is what comes default with a new Drupal installation.

So that’s it for this time and if you have not already signed up for the codekarate.com newsletter please do so and follow me on Twitter @smthomas3. And the reason I want you to do that is because I want you to let me know what videos you want to see.
So if you have a module and you’d like it demonstrated or you have specific question, you can contact me through my codekarate.com site or on Twitter and I will try to put a video up answering that. So until next time, this is the Daily Dose of Drupal, thanks for watching.