301 redirect generator for safer site migrations

301, 302, 307 or 308: which code to choose

A redirect is a server response telling the client where a page has moved. 301 and 308 mean “moved permanently”: Google treats them as a strong signal that the destination is the new canonical URL. 302 and 307 mean “temporary”: the old URL stays the main one. The difference between 301 and 308 (and between 302 and 307) is that the newer codes preserve the HTTP method, which matters for forms and APIs rather than ordinary pages. For a migration or a URL change, pick 301; for the cases where a temporary redirect makes sense, read the guide to 301 and 302 redirects.

The 410 code is not a redirect: it says the page was removed on purpose and has no equivalent. Use it only for URLs that truly have nowhere to go.

A redirect plan for a migration

The basic rule: a 1:1 map, each old URL pointing to the closest equivalent page on the new site. Start from a full list of old URLs (a crawl, the sitemap, pages with traffic in analytics, pages with external links), then match them one by one. Sending every page to the homepage does not help the visitor and may be treated by Google as a soft 404; such pages can show up in the page indexing report in Search Console, and the guide to pages that are not indexed explains what to do with them. If a page has no equivalent, an honest 404 or 410 beats a forced redirect.

The complete migration plan — inventory, map, testing, monitoring — is in the article on migrating a site without losing SEO. If you are rebuilding the site as well, building an SEO-optimized website includes the redirect map from day one.

Chains, loops and rule order

• A chain (A → B → C) appears when a destination was itself moved later. Every hop adds delay, and Googlebot follows only a limited number of consecutive redirects (Google’s documentation mentions up to 10 hops). The “Flatten chains” option writes A → C directly; update internal links to point at the final URL too, and if two URLs end up showing the same content, see canonical tags and duplicate content.
• A loop (A → B → A, or A → A) never ends: the browser shows a “too many redirects” error. The tool detects them and keeps them out of the output.
• Order matters. Exact rules must come before wildcard rules, and specific ones (/blog/2018/*) before general ones (/blog/*); otherwise the general rule takes the requests. The tool orders them automatically, but check the result. In Apache, Redirect also matches sub-paths, which is why RewriteRule is the default variant.
• Query strings (?id=12) are not part of the path: servers handle them separately, and fragments (#) never reach the server at all.

How long to keep redirects

As long as you can. For site moves, Google recommends keeping them for at least a year (longer if possible), but external links, bookmarks and engines that still hold the old URLs keep sending visitors well after that. A redirect costs almost nothing, so delete one only after checking that it no longer receives requests.

What the tool does and does not do

The tool turns your list into rules for Apache, nginx, Cloudflare Bulk Redirects (a CSV list; check Cloudflare’s documentation for its current format), the WordPress Redirection plugin or CSV, and flags the obvious problems. It does not test the rules on your server: the outcome depends on your setup (CMS, cache, CDN, other rules already in place). Load the rules on a staging environment first, check with curl -I or a crawler, and watch Search Console after launch. Redirects are part of technical SEO; if you want someone to review them together with the rest of the site, see technical SEO optimization or an SEO audit, and for multilingual sites add the hreflang generator.