Netlify redirects

Those running a public web server are frequently subject to bot scans. While using best practices is the proper approach, there may still be a lot of 404 log results from bots. Declutter the log by redirecting bot URLs to a single zero-byte empty page while still returning code 404.

Another choice is to return HTTP status codes. Netlify only allows a few _redirects HTTP status codes. We redirect bot URLs to /bot.html and return a 404 code using an empty file.

Empty files: since these files are legitimate, but may not be used by your site, we create empty files for these:

favicon.ico
ads.txt
app-ads.txt

The Netlify _redirects file should be in the site publish directory. For Hugo it may be “public/_redirects”. We prefer the _redirects file to netlify.toml, because the redirect syntax is much more concise in _redirects files. Use Netlify Playground to instantly test file syntax.

Here is our _redirects file for a Hugo blog, which may need editing to be suitable for your site.

References: