Protect established URLs
- Minor
- Structural
- IF
- AND
- THEN
- ELSE
The decision
- IF
- an older URL has links, traffic, or history and the only proposed improvement is a prettier slug
- THEN
- keep the URL unless expected benefit clearly exceeds migration risk
- ELSE
- optimize the new URL before launch
- Primary metric
- post-change value retention
- Guardrail
- redirect chains
- Reason
- Makes the decision explicit, measurable, and reversible where possible.
- LAKA levels
- Minor
- Structural
- Operators
- IF
- AND
- THEN
- ELSE
- Governs gates
- distinct task
- Source
- 04-IF-ELSE-AND-OR-RULEBOOK.md — CLU-010 — Protect established URLs
The other eleven rules in Clustering and Canonical Ownership
- CLU-001 One dominant intent, one owner IF a dominant intent cluster is approved Baseline
- CLU-002 Merge same-task candidates IF sense, task, answer structure, result class, and next action are compatible Baseline
- CLU-003 Split different tasks IF queries share vocabulary but require different completion conditions or document forms Baseline
- CLU-004 Use result overlap as evidence, not law IF current top results overlap strongly for two queries Baseline
- CLU-005 Detect cannibalization by behavior IF multiple owned URLs receive the same cluster’s impressions with unstable dominance or divided value Baseline
- CLU-006 Merge with migration discipline IF two pages are redundant and one combined page is superior Structural
- CLU-007 Reposition a useful weaker page IF a weaker page has independent value but overlaps the stronger page’s task Major
- CLU-008 Inspect equity before deletion IF a page appears useless or redundant Baseline
- CLU-009 Align canonical signals IF duplicate or parameter URLs must remain accessible Structural
- CLU-011 Keep lexical variants together IF differences are spelling, word order, pluralization, abbreviation, or stemming without task change Minor
- CLU-012 Test uncertain cluster boundaries IF merge/split evidence is inconclusive Baseline
This rule as JSON: GET /v1/rules/CLU-010