Tagged “redirects”
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Moving Content Between a Subdomain and a Subdirectory
What actually changes when blog.example.com becomes example.com/blog: host boundaries, robots and sitemap scope, redirect mapping, and geo signals.
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How to Tell Scraper Traffic From Real Crawlers in Your Logs
Unfamiliar bot traffic in your access logs is often a third-party scraping API, not Googlebot or a hostile attack. Here's how to tell the difference.
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What a Redirect Chain Looks Like From a Scraping API's Perspective
A scraping API fetching a URL on someone else's behalf has to decide how many hops to follow and what to hand back. Both choices are easy to miss.
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404 Versus 410 and How Long a Dead URL Lingers
Both codes mean the page is gone. One says it might come back. What each does to recrawl scheduling, and when the difference is worth the config.
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Soft 404s: When a 200 Response Is Treated as Missing
A soft 404 is a page that returns 200 but reads as empty. What triggers the reclassification, how to find them, and how to fix each cause.
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Preserving Links Through a Site Migration
The redirect map is the migration. How to build one from the URLs that actually matter, and the order of operations on launch day.
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301 Versus 302 and What Each Does to Link Equity
What the four redirect status codes mean, how crawlers treat them, and why the 85%-decay figure you've read has no source.
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Retiring a Page That Still Has Inbound Links
A decision path for killing a URL other sites point at: when to redirect, when to merge, when to leave it up, and when 410 is honest.
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Canonical, Redirect, or Noindex: Picking the Right One
Three tools for three different problems, routinely swapped for each other. A decision path based on what you want to happen to users and signals.
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Trailing Slashes Are Different URLs
/page and /page/ are two addresses that can serve two responses. How to pick one, enforce it in a single hop, and stop generating both.
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Uppercase URLs and the Duplicates They Create
Paths are case-sensitive, hosts are not. Where mixed-case URLs come from, what they duplicate, and how to normalise without breaking real files.
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Consolidating www and HTTPS in a Single Hop
Four host and protocol variants, one canonical address. Why separate rules chain, how to combine them, and where HSTS fits.
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Where to Put a Redirect: Edge, Server, or Application
The same 301 behaves differently depending on which layer emits it. Latency, visibility, deploy coupling, and the shadowing that hides broken rules.
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Meta Refresh and JavaScript Redirects
Client-side redirects happen after a 200 response. How crawlers treat them, when they are the only option, and the delay that makes one a dead end.
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Redirect Chains and How to Flatten Them
Chains form by accretion, not by design. How to find them, why length matters, and how to flatten one that crosses three systems.
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Internal Linking as Plumbing
Click depth, orphan pages, and crawl paths — internal links are the only part of the link graph you fully control.