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Old URLs ending in ".html" are 404s; should they redirect instead? #2332

@ExplodingCabbage

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@ExplodingCabbage

Via the Wayback Machine, I see that https://expressjs.com/en/advanced/best-practice-performance.html was a valid URL less than a month ago. Now it is a 404 page. It looks like the content that was once there is now located at https://expressjs.com/en/advanced/best-practice-performance/ instead.

Okay, fine, but this is super-unhelpful to me as a (first-time) end user. Google results currently link me exclusively to the 404 pages, and from a quick sample I would guess that every single one of the 2500 links to the Express docs on Stack Overflow is now a dead link. (I would also not be surprised if this were an incredibly potent act on anti-SEO; I don't know if historical pagerank will flow to the new docs URLs. It would be unfortunate if the official docs dropped off the Google results for Express-related searches as a result!)

I have not carefully dug into the recent changes that led to this, but is it not possible to simply have URLs ending in .html redirect to fix it?

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