SEO and the dot-com website

Hi folks

Wonder if you can help?

I'm working on a commercial drupal project where a chunk of work had already been done by someone who did not understand drupal, using a specification which is, to say the least, flexible. (So I've just spent 3 weeks replacing all the hardwired content with modules and blocks; training up the original programmer; and now I'm "encouraging" the company to get a real spec in place so we can actually do this project and reach an end.)

Anyway.

One of the issues is that this website (which has a .com TLD) has some UK content and some US content and some global content. It already has thousands of pages (they have people on it full time entering data) which have a tag as to whether it's UK, US or Global -- and each page has auto path-aliased URLs most of which have already been spidered.

They've been advised by their SEO company that they need to somehow specify the regionality in the URLs so that the spiders will identify the UK content as UK (the global and US can remain unaltered). Other countries may be added in future.

So my question is: Has anyone got any ideas of the best way changing the path so that the actual page URLs themselves aren't altered? (I have tried searching on drupal.org, but I haven't been able to nail down search terms that give me what I need.)

For example, is there a transparent way of adding UK ;ike this http://www.wibble.com/uk/... ?

Or should they go to (say) http://uk.wibble.com/... ?

Or something else?

TIA

Steve

Nailed it

custom_url_rewrite is the solution.

I can add new path aliases for pages that already exist (add 301 rewrites for the old names -- that's gonna be a big file, pity I can't just leave the old URLs but that amounts to duplicate content and SEO doesn't like that).

New nodes can have the 'uk' (or whatever) added automatically depending on the node content.

Steve Turnbull

I don't know how many

I don't know how many UK-specific pages there are already but you can use http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect to set up individual 301 redirects as required. However, custom_url_rewrite() might let you do it all automatically by inserting the /uk/ iff the UK page tag is set ... as you've probably discovered ...

Also http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect is a must for preventing "duplicate" content and ensuring a node is accessed only via the desired URL.

Giles Kennedy --> www.alexoria.co.uk

Thanks for the

Thanks for the globalredirect reference, I shall examine it for hints :-) and quite possibly use it as well.

Steve Turnbull