Reflections on a few days with Drupal

I've been experimenting with Drupal on this site and one other for a few days now and overall, let me say I'm very impressed. With that said, there are a few things I think could be better and that's mostly to do with the URL alias system and specifically how it relates to search engine optimization.

By default, Drupal stores all content with clean URLs resembling http://domain.tld/node/article_id_#. This obviously isn't pretty, for one thing, and it's not easily changed to say content, or articles or what have you instead of node without adding extra modules. I feel that this function should be built into the core of Drupal. The next issue comes from a SEO perspective, in that these URLs mean absolutely nothing to search engines. There is no date, and there is no title. A better way to name your paths for good search engine ranking would be http://domain.tld/yyyy-mm-dd/post_title. Again, this is easily accomplished with an additional module, but I think this is something else that the Drupal devs should consider having built-in with the core distribution, rather than forcing users to search for and add a module. Going more into SEO, you should also be sure that you don't have duplicate content, I.E: URLs that lead to the same content, as is possible due to the current bolt-on nature of various URL alias modules. With the Pathauto module installed, it is still possible to reach content from the /node/# links, which will hurt your search engine rankings, possibly even causing you to be de-listed. The solution for me right now is the Global Redirect module which redirects /node/* links to the relevant URL alias as well as removing trailing slashes (another source of the dreaded duplicate-content-syndrome). Now... since all these modules are separate and not official, I don't expect this to happen, but if more URL aliasing options were incorporated into Drupal, the other things (redirection) should be incorporated as well.

Now, I know this looks like a LOT of complaining and whining, but I'm honestly not too put out by the extra work I had to do, I just think it would be better if it wasn't necessary. Drupal is an excellent piece of software, and it's by far the best CMS I've ever used, so these complaints are but small issues in the midst of the great praise I have for the Drupal team and all their hard work.