Why 301 Redirects Matter
When restructuring blog URLs from /2022/04/post-title/ to /posts/post-title, search engines must be informed that the content has moved permanently. Failing to do so causes immediate ranking drops and broken backlinks.
Building the Middleware
By capturing incoming requests in custom middleware and executing fast index lookups against a redirects table, incoming visitors and search crawlers are immediately routed to the canonical destination without impacting application latency.