Migration redirects: crawler vs. status-code mapper

Migration redirects: crawler vs. status-code mapper
This week on the radar — when a 'core update drop' is really a botched migration eating your equity.

🔗 [Crawler redirect reports] — surface chains and loops (301→301→404) that bleed PageRank and slow recrawl; essential after any move.
🔗 [Bulk status-code checkers] — paste your old-URL list, confirm each lands on a 200 with a single hop; faster for spot-checks.
🔗 [GSC Page Indexing — 'Redirect' and 'Not found' buckets] — Google's view of which old URLs it still tries and where they go.

The tradeoff: crawlers find chains you didn't know existed; bulk checkers verify the mapping you intended actually holds. Run the crawler to discover, the bulk checker to verify, GSC to confirm Google agrees. Skip step three and you'll mistake a redirect mistake for an algorithm one.

One to bookmark: GSC's 'Page with redirect' export against your intended map — the cleanest before/after of a migration's link preservation.