Note: This article will not cover the installation of Drupal. The first thing I do is turn on the clean URLs. This option is available when logged in as an administrator under Administer>Site Configuration>Clean URLs. Drupal requires that you run the test first to determine whether or not your server is set up with PHP's mod_rewrite module. This will enable the use of meaningful URLs, rather than PHP posting text. To further compliment the use of clean URLs, we are going to install a Drupal module that will automatically name our posts and pages for us. This module is pathauto, download the appropriate package and upload the pathauto folder into the modules folder on your server. Be sure to enable it under Drupal's module section. If you have already created content and are only now installing this module, then it is important that you navigate to the pathauto configuration section and have it bulk generate index aliases.

One problem with Drupal is the creation of duplicate pages. For example: if you create a new post, then you will be presented with four different URLs for the same content:

http://example.com/new-post

http://example.com/new-post/

http://example.com/node/2

http://example.com/node/2/

This practice looks bad to search engines. So, we need to edit our .htaccess file, located at the root of our webserver, to prevent it from using the trailing slash. We will then edit our robots.txt file to prevent the search engines from indexing the /node area, thus preventing it from being an issue.

First we open out .htaccess file and add the following to the beginning of the file (replace example\.com with your domain name):

# remove trailing slashes
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example\\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Next we need to edit our robots.txt file to prevent the search engines from indexing our /node area. Add the following line:

Disallow: /node/

That should take care of the basic SEO setbacks that come with a default installation of Drupal. You may also want to implement the XML Sitemap module to automatically produce a sitemap when new content is created. It will also notify several search engines when it is updated.

The domain had already been submitted to the search engines and, as such, had already been indexed. This meant that there were locations that may be checked. While using Dreamhost's redirect option, users trying to go to http://example.net/contact/ would be redirected to http://example.comcontact/. This is, of course, a completely bogus URL and would return a page error. Having a request redirected to a location like this would lower your sites standing in the search engines' indexes. The solution came by implementing my own 301 Redirect in the domain's .htacess file. I wiped out the existing .htaccess file from that domain (it was leftover from the previously installed CMS). I then created a new one in its place that only consisted of the following one line:

Redirect 301 / http://example.com/</pre>

That was it. After that, any specific requests sent to the .net domain were translated over to the .com URL and redirected accordingly.