slug migration 301 redirects

Changing a URL structure or fixing a slug-generation rule often leads to a massive spike in 404 errors. These broken links destroy SEO authority and waste crawl budget as Google spends months retrying dead pages. This skill automates the generation of verified 301 redirect tables specifically for Nginx environments.

What it does

• Slug reconstruction identifies the transformation logic required to map old URLs to their new equivalents.
• Disk-level verification ensures a redirect is only created if the old path is missing and the target path exists.
• Nginx map generation produces structured map files that handle thousands of redirects without bloating server configurations.
• Config auditing checks for common Nginx pitfalls like map_hash_bucket_size limits and symlink mismatches.
• Safety validation provides a workflow for testing configuration syntax and verifying redirect headers before production deployment.

How it works

1. Configure the generator by defining the site root and the specific slug transformation rule in the Python script.
2. Execute the verification script to scan the filesystem and identify valid redirect pairs.
3. Deploy the Nginx map to the server, ensuring the map_hash directives are present to handle large datasets.
4. Test and reload using nginx -t to confirm syntax before applying the changes to live traffic.

Frameworks & tools

This skill utilizes Python for filesystem scanning and URL mapping. It is designed for Nginx web servers using map blocks for efficient redirect handling.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic AI prompts often suggest regex rules that cause collateral damage to valid URLs. This skill enforces a "verify on disk" requirement, ensuring every single redirect leads to a live page and never creates a redirect loop or a broken target.

Use cases

• Migrating a blog structure from /post/slug to /articles/slug.
• Removing redundant category suffixes from thousands of indexed product URLs.
• Cleaning up Search Console 404 errors after a site-wide redesign.
• Preserving SEO link equity when changing URL naming conventions in a CMS.

Known limitations

This skill requires the site to be served from a static filesystem for verification. It is not suitable for dynamically generated URLs that do not exist as files on disk.