{"id":1581,"date":"2012-07-17T20:18:32","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T00:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/2012\/07\/17\/sef-intro\/"},"modified":"2021-08-16T23:39:21","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T03:39:21","slug":"sef-intro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/edu\/drupal\/sef-intro\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding SEF URLs in Drupal 7"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Drupal 7 has a built in system to \u201cclean\u201d URLs so they are search  engine friendly. In this tutorial, we\u2019ll explain further what search  engine friendly URLS are.<\/p>\n<p>With most websites on the Internet being dynamically generated, the  URL usually contains information about the query being used to generate  the page on the server. Some search engines will not index pages that  have special characters in the URL, which is needed to generate the  page.<\/p>\n<p class=\"alert\">All of InMotion Hosting\u2019s servers support mod_rewrite which is needed to use \u201c<strong>clean<\/strong>\u201d  URLs. If you are not hosting with InMotion, you may have to enable  Apache mod_rewrite on the server or contact your hosting provider for  further information.<\/p>\n<p>Drupal makes solving this quite easy. So let\u2019s take a look at an example:<\/p>\n<table class=\"article_table\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<th>Before<\/th>\n<th>After<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>https:\/\/drupal.inmotiontesting.com<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\/?q=about_us<\/span><\/td>\n<td>https:\/\/drupal.inmotiontesing.com<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\/about_us<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><a href=\"\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url2.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox-0\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"598\" src=\"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url2-1024x598.jpg\" class=\"optimized-lcp-image\" alt=\"drupal_blog_3xx\" loading=\"eager\" fetchpriority=\"high\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url2-1024x598.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url2-300x175.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url2-768x449.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url2.jpg 1304w\"><\/a>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<td><a href=\"\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url3.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox-0\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"drupal_blog_3x\" class=\"std_ss\" height=\"751\" src=\"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/drupal_drupal_clean_url3.jpg\" style=\"max-width: 250px;\" width=\"1303\"><\/a>\n<div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>If you notice, nothing on the page changed. The only thing that changed is in the URL structure from:<br><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><em>?q=about_us<\/em><\/span> to <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><em>about_us<br><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><em><\/em><\/span>There are no longer any characters that could cause an issue with search engines.<\/p>\n<p>In our next few tutorials, we will show you <a href=\"\/support\/edu\/drupal\/how-to-enable-search-engine-friendly-urls-in-drupal-7\/\">how to enable clean URLs<\/a> and also <a href=\"\/support\/edu\/drupal\/setting-up-url-aliases-in-drupal\/\">how to set your custom aliases<\/a> (in the above example, <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">about_us<\/span> is the custom alias).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Drupal 7 has a built in system to \u201cclean\u201d URLs so they are search engine friendly. In this tutorial, we\u2019ll explain further what search engine friendly URLS are. With most websites on the Internet being dynamically generated, the URL usually contains information about the query being used to generate the page on the server. Some<a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.inmotionhosting.com\/support\/edu\/drupal\/sef-intro\/\"> Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[372],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drupal"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Understanding SEF URLs in Drupal 7 | InMotion Hosting<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In this introductory tutorial, we&#039;ll explain the concept of search engine friendly URLs in Drupal 7.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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