There are only two or three Drupal modules that I have installed on every single Drupal site I set up. At the top of this short list is Global Redirect. There are many reasons for its existence, not the least of which is Search Engine Optimization. Global Redirect does such niceties as remove slashes from the end of URLs and makes sure the home page of the site is the standard home page, and not an alias to it (like /front, or /home-page).
Basically, the module is an "SEO-in-a-box" module; sure there are other things you should do to get your Drupal site more optimized, but this module is like the icing on the cake for Drupal. It makes sure that all links to the site will direct to one, and only one link. That way, people copying out a link to a certain page on your site always get the same link, thus boosting your pagerank.
But this module earns kudos from me for more than that reason alone; it goes one further and does something that almost no other Drupal modules do: makes life simple. Download the module, copy it to your server, enable it, and you're done. The default settings are sensible, non-intrusive, and just. work. If only other modules were so nice!
It does only a few things, but it does them <almost> perfectly [see comment by You below], and makes certain aspects of SEO dead simple.
Unless you're doing some special URL re-writing on your site (i.e. more than just using Pathauto and Path), you should have this module installed on your public-facing Drupal sites.
Read more on SEO with Drupal: Search Engine Optimization with Drupal [From Webmaster Tips].
Comments
Its not perfect - there is no way to choose which alias of a page should be the one redirected to.
This could probably be fixed by allowing some weighting or even criteria for automatic weighting of the aliases.
Apart from that, its very good.
Quite true... I didn't even think about that, as none of the sites I'm working on have more than one alias to a node. For some sites, though, I guess there would be multiple aliases. I just haven't set a site up with that kind of requirement, so it wasn't on my radar.
For @you - simple solution: never have multiple aliases.
If you need multiple URLs to _forward_ to one piece of content, use http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect
@greggles - interesting idea there... I've used Path Redirect on a few sites that I migrated from another platform, but never thought of using it for extra paths *within* a Drupal site... good find!
Global redirect is a great module. It solves the very few SEO problems that Drupal has. Drupal + G. Redirect + pathauto is THE most SEO-friendly CMS system that I know of.
It's also her handy for when an editor decides to cahnge the URL of a node after it has been published. Any old links to the old alias are forwarded.
Added to DrupalSightings.com
@Jim - thanks for the add - and nice site!