How do I redirect/handle requests from search engines via nginx using location regex
You cannot check for arguments in the location name (nginx docs):
Note that locations of all types test only a URI part of request line without arguments. This is done because arguments in the query string may be given in several ways, for example:
/index.php?user=john&page=1
/index.php?page=1&user=john
You could setup a rewrite rule in the server section (found here):
if ($args ~ “_escaped_fragment_=(.+)”) { set $real_url $1; rewrite ^ /crawler$real_url;}and define a "/crawler" location, which can be redirected to your HTML generating server.
I solved this problem this way:
if ( $arg__escaped_fragment_ ) { return 301 $uri$arg__escaped_fragment_;}