There seems to be a lot of discussion about search engine optimization with drupal, using different modules to accomplish different things relating to search engine rankings (path, path_auto), clean URLs, positioning your content towards the top of the page, server settings, robots.txt settings, etc. This all (in someway) relates to how your website ranks within the major search engines (MSN, Google, Yahoo).
We are currently have clean URLs enabled, and I use the Path module to create aliases for some regions of the site. The rest of the content follows the standard URL formats of /blog/*, /node/*, etc.
Has anyone seen significant, or even slightly better, search engine rankings due to using the Path Auto module. I realize it creates nice looking URLs, but is there really a difference?
I'm trying to figure out how to mix up my permissions a bit and get things really fine grained (corporate intranet) and I figured one of these two may help. You see what I really need is something like good old unix permissions. Being able to set a 755 on a node would be fantastic.
One of the above plus OG and taxonomy access (or tac_lite) should do it but I'm not sure exactly where to go. esp. in regards to a future upgrade path.