Original lab · Website migration
Can a redirect map stay one-to-one when routes look alike?
This compact benchmark separates the easy case—identical paths on a new origin—from an intentionally ambiguous summer-sale inventory. It is designed to expose where automated similarity must stop and owner review must begin.
Question and decision rule
The benchmark asks whether every old URL has exactly one defensible destination. The fixture is not trying to prove SEO success. A mapping is ready for implementation only when a reviewer can explain every destination, collisions are resolved, and the actual server syntax has been tested outside this page.
Expected clear case
Four old URLs and four new URLs share the same paths across different synthetic origins. Exact path equality provides a reviewable candidate for each source.
Expected review case
Three old summer-sale routes compete for two similar destinations. The benchmark intentionally supplies no content IDs, analytics, canonicals, or owner overrides, so a one-to-one answer cannot be asserted from strings alone.
Method
- Normalize scheme, host, path, query, and trailing-slash representation without inventing content equivalence.
- Compare exact path candidates before weaker token or route-shape similarity.
- Count sources, destinations, unmatched routes, and destinations claimed by more than one source.
- Send every ambiguous or low-confidence mapping to a named owner; do not convert it into a production rule automatically.
- After approval, test the generated rules against the real edge or web server and monitor old and new URLs.
Repeatable fixtures and SHA-256 evidence
These files are synthetic and use the reserved .test domain. From the repository root, run the command exactly as shown. The links belong to this local review build and are not claimed to be live on the public site.
shasum -a 256 app/fixtures/flagship-editorial-20260713/website-migration/*.txt- pass-old.txt72bfd81206bc4d91dc6c3a0828f989fcd8aafff1d2fa078c2ae0d48e88b49afd
- pass-new.txt34ece7b122278a88628e6807b73545db2e75914147d7a82fa9cdd1a62843c2fa
- review-old.txt08cfe8f7deff7fbb0d5ad3218ba26d243b0b19154a0f9b468200a944e7d13127
- review-new.txtfb07a6ca038a259be64c5510988f27eb441693fd5f8485d4c0dfcca9030d2b17
Deterministic fixture observations
| Case | Old URLs | New URLs | What the fixture proves | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Same-path move | 4 | 4 | Every old path has a same-path destination in the supplied inventory. | Candidate for owner approval |
| Ambiguous sale routes | 3 | 2 | The inventory alone is insufficient for a defensible one-to-one map. | Manual review |
This table is a direct count of fixture lines. It does not claim how the live workbench will score confidence, because scoring logic and input context can change. A fresh export is the evidence for an actual run.
Limits, privacy, and safe interpretation
Limits
- No live crawl, DNS change, redirect deployment, ranking forecast, or traffic guarantee.
- No server logs, inbound-link data, content IDs, hreflang graph, or authenticated route evidence.
- String similarity cannot decide whether two pages serve the same user need.
Privacy boundary
Use public, staged, synthetic, or redacted inventories. Do not include preview tokens, credentials, customer identifiers, or authenticated URLs. The canonical tool processes pasted or selected inventories in the browser, but a trusted device and approved handling policy are still required.
Official sources
- Google Search Central: How to move a site — URL inventories, mapping, redirects, testing, and monitoring.
- RFC 9110, section 15.4 — HTTP redirection status semantics.
- Sitemaps protocol — sitemap URL inventory structure.
- Cloudflare Bulk Redirects documentation — one deployment target that must be tested in its own environment.
Corrections and reproducibility
FastTool is the publisher responsible for this page. Report a wrong count, stale source, ambiguous instruction, or fixture/hash mismatch to [email protected]. Include this URL, the exact statement, your evidence, and the change you recommend. Material corrections are recorded in the changelog.
Reviewed 2026-07-13 · Editorial fixture set flagship-editorial-20260713.