What is the best approach for redirection of old pages in Jekyll and GitHub Pages?
I have blog on github pages - jekyll
What is the best way to solve url strategy migration?
I found the best practice in common is create htaccess like so
Redirect 301 /programovani/2010/04/git-co-to-je-a-co-s-tim/ /2010/04/05/git-co-to-je-a-co-s-tim.html
But it does not seems to work with Github. Another solution i found is create rake task, which will generate redirection pages. But since it's an html, it's not able to send 301 head, so SE crawlers will not recognize it as an redirection.
Solution 1:
The best solution is to use both <meta http-equiv="refresh" and <link rel="canonical" href=
It works very well, Google Bot reindexed my entire website under new links without losing positions. Also the users are redirected to the new posts right away.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://konradpodgorski.com/blog/2013/10/21/how-i-migrated-my-blog-from-wordpress-to-octopress/">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://konradpodgorski.com/blog/2013/10/21/how-i-migrated-my-blog-from-wordpress-to-octopress/" />
Using <meta http-equiv="refresh" will redirect each visitor to the new post.
As for Google Bot, it treats <link rel="canonical" href= as 301 redirect, the effect is that you get your pages reindexed and that is what you want.
I described whole process how I moved my blog from Wordpress to Octopress here. http://konradpodgorski.com/blog/2013/10/21/how-i-migrated-my-blog-from-wordpress-to-octopress/#redirect-301-on-github-pages
Solution 2:
Have you tried the Jekyll Alias Generator plugin?
You put the alias urls in the YAML front matter of a post:
---
layout: post
title: "My Post With Aliases"
alias: [/first-alias/index.html, /second-alias/index.html]
---
When a user visits one of the alias urls, they are redirected to the main url via a meta tag refresh:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/blog/my-post-with-aliases/" />
</head>
</html>
See also this blog post on the subject.