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.
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
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.
This solution allows you to use true HTTP redirects via .htaccess — however, nothing involving .htaccess will work on GitHub pages because they do not use Apache.
As of May 2014 GitHub Pages supports redirects, but according to the jekyll-redirect-from Gem documentation they are still based on HTTP-REFRESH (using <meta> tags), which requires full a page load before redirection can occur.
I don't like the <meta> approach so I whipped up a solution for anyone looking to provide real HTTP 301 redirects within an .htaccess file using Apache, which serves a pre-generated Jekyll site:
First, add .htaccess to the include property in _config.yml
include: [.htaccess]
Next, create an .htaccess file and be sure to include YAML front matter. Those dashes are important because now Jekyll will parse the file with Liquid, Jekyll's templating language:
---
---
DirectoryIndex index.html
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
...
Make sure your posts that require redirects have two properties like so:
---
permalink: /my-new-path/
original: blog/my/old/path.php
---
Now in .htaccess, just add a loop:
{% for post in site.categories.post %}
RewriteRule ^{{ post.original }} {{ post.permalink }} [R=301,L]
{% endfor %}
This will dynamically generate .htaccess every time you build the site, and the include in your config file ensures that .htaccess makes it into _site directory.
RewriteRule ^blog/my/old/path.php /my-new-path/ [R=301,L]
From there, it's up to you to serve _site using Apache. I normally clone the full Jekyll repo into a non-webroot directory, then my vhost is a symlink to the _site folder:
ln -s /path/to/my-blog/_site /var/www/vhosts/my-blog.com
Tada! Now Apache can serve the _site folder from your virtual root, complete with .htaccess-powered redirects that use whichever HTTP response code you desire!
You could even get super fancy and use a redirect property within each post's front matter to designate which redirect code to use in your .htaccess loop.