Redirect Rules Generator

A redirect is a promise: “the thing you wanted lives here now.” Kept properly — one hop, permanent status, exact destination — it transfers users, bookmarks, backlinks and ranking signals almost losslessly. Broken — chained, looped, pointed at a 404, or left as a “temporary” 302 for three years — it quietly bleeds every one of those. Site migrations succeed or fail almost entirely on the quality of the redirect map, which is why generating the rules from a reviewed pair list beats hand-editing server config every time.

The loop and chain detection here catches the failure modes that hand-written rules produce. A loop (/a → /b → /a) takes the page down completely — browsers give up with an error after ~20 hops. A chain (/a → /b → /c) usually comes from stacking migrations: the 2019 rules point at 2021 URLs which now redirect again. The fix the tool suggests is always the same — repoint the oldest rule directly at the final destination. Duplicate sources matter too: in most servers only the first matching rule fires, so the second is dead config that confuses the next maintainer.

The four output formats cover the common stacks with their real syntax quirks handled. Apache's Redirect directive matches path prefixes; Nginx exact-match location = blocks are the fastest dispatch the server offers and avoid accidental prefix captures; Next.js permanent: true emits a 308 (method-preserving — usually what you want); the _redirects flat file works on both Cloudflare Pages and Netlify. Whatever the platform, deploy to staging first and click through a sample — a typo in a redirect file fails loudly.

After shipping, verify the promises are kept: run the destination pages through SEO Audit Pro in live mode — its redirect-chain check renders every hop with status codes — update your sitemap to list only final URLs in the Sitemap Studio, and make sure nothing in robots.txt blocks crawlers from discovering the moves via the Robots.txt Studio.