Err...404s on a bunch of links on Bryght.com this weekend were, in fact, my fault. I flipped some switches in the pathauto module and blasted a bunch of existing friendly URLs away.

Jeff Eaton posts on Drupal.org about the goodness of pathauto when used correctly: Holy Cow, does pathauto ever rock:

A few months ago I migrated my movable type blog over to drupal. I used pathauto as an easy way of creating path aliases to match MT's old archive URL format -- breaking old links is bad, and all that. What I wasn't expecting was the huge spike in search engine traffic.

Now, my blog is clearly not Instapundit, DKos or Engadget, or something like that. It's a personal site where I ramble about drupal and gaming and personal events and post photos and rant about sociology occasionally. With drupal and pathauto, though, I've jumped into the top ten Google hits for a number of commonly used phrases. I'm even the top result for a number of the topics I've posted on.

This is huge. As someone who, back in the day, did 'search engine optimization' for a small web company, the fact that I've jumped into the top results of any google search purely by accident is cool news. Drupal's clean, structured HTML plus the search engine friendly urls are a killer combination.