During my migration from Gridsome to Nuxt I mentioned that I was having issues getting the deep:true part of the Nuxt Context module working, and took The Lazy Dev™ approach and just didn't use it, essentially flattening my directory structure. Unfortunately, this led to the shortening of my blog posts URLs, which has consequences when Google Search Console suddenly thinks the pages are gone!

Thankfully, all that was required was to add redirects from my old (and now broken) links to the correct URLs. However, I didn't want to create and maintain a growing list of post redirects since one of the reasons for migrating to Nuxt was to decrease my number of steps required to go from draft to posted.

Enter Netlify Redirects

After my poking around Google Search Console for a bit to figure out what was happening, I realized that when I removed the article subdirectory from the content directory, I had in fact updated all of the blog post URLs, removing the articles/ from my old URLs. To fix this, I needed a way to tell Google that any urls that started with TerabyteTiger.com/lessons/articles/postName needed to map to TerabyteTiger.com/lessons/postName.

Create _redirects in static/

To begin fixing this issue, we need to create a file called _redirects - Note that there is no file extension! This will need to remain intact after running our build process, so we want this to be located in our static/ directory.

Create a file called _redirects - Note that there is no file extension!

Add URLs to remap

Once we create our _redirects file, we'll add our first column - the URLs to remap. For me this looked like this:

/lessons/articles/*
/blog/*

/blog/ was an old url pattern, but I figured might as well catch those as well. Note that at the end of these, there is a * to indicate that we still want to catch anything that meets this pattern, even if it has additional characters following the last /.

Add :splat redirects

Now we'll add a tab or two at the end of each line and follow that with the new URL to direct to.

/lessons/articles/*     /lessons/:splat
/blog/*                 /lessons

On the first line, you'll notice we're using :splat - this will return everything that was caught by the * in our first column, so /lessons/articles/myBlogPost will become /lessons/myBlogPost and /lessons/articles/2022/postName will become /lessons/2022/postName.

A few days after publishing these updates, my Search Console was back to normal 🎉

For more information see Netlify's Redirects and Rewrites docs!