The purpose of the module is to redirect all “dead” pages (404) by itself without your intervention.
Its first option allows you to retrieve URLs of pages not found and applies a redirection if terms are similar in the database, otherwise it adds an entry
This allows you to correct mistyped or slightly wrong URLs for 99% of them and ensure that your SEO remains correct despite errors in external links for example.
The module also manages the redirection of deactivated or deleted pages by sending them back to their logical parent, for example a deleted product will have its URL sent back to
The last redirection algorithm to the parent folders allows to retrieve the last potentially out-of-field items of the first two types. It will take for example /folder/subfolder to redirect to /folder. If folder doesn’t exist either it will send to /. This also allows you to recover a large part of the old 404 pages that are still unindexed from deleted pages without having to manage them one by one.
In the case of a migration you can also use the Regex mode, although this one is very greedy and reserved to developers. It allows you to use the php preg_match function in the following way:
preg_match(‘/’.$rule.’/i’, $url)
The / are escaped by the program, you don’t have to.