As the importance of SEO continues to grow, so do the requirements for SEO friendly CMS'.

One feature request that keeps coming up among our customers is the ability to customize the automatically created URL aliases for nodes. Specifically, clients (supported by SEO experts) would like to shorten the URLs created, while still keeping them relevant to the node in question.

One approach that has been suggested is to only use the last element of the content-hierarchy as the URL alias. This means that if you have a content structure like this:

Main page > Products > Category > Product

the URL alias would be

/Product

instead of

/Products/Category/Product

as it currently would be. This would of course result in more URLs having a number appended. For instance, the following two elements would produce the same URL alias, and hence an auto-increment number would have to be added, as is currently the case with several elements of the same name in the same folder.

Main page > Products > Category > Product
Main page > Services > Product

Still, our clients are willing to sacrifice the "human friendliness" of URLs in order to make them more SEO friendly.