What is the best approach for redirection of old pages in Jekyll and GitHub Pages?
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.
redirect-from plugin
https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from#redirect-to
It is supported by GitHub and makes it easy:
_config.yml
gems:
- jekyll-redirect-from
a.md
---
permalink: /a
redirect_to: 'http://example.com'
---
as explained at: https://help.github.com/articles/redirects-on-github-pages/
Now:
firefox localhost:4000/a
will redirect you to example.com.
The plugin takes over whenever the redirect_to is defined by the page.
Tested on GitHub pages v64.
Note: this version has a serious recently fixed bug which wrongly reuses the default layout for the redirect: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from/pull/106
Manual layout method
If you don't feel like using https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from it's easy to implement it yourself:
a.md
---
layout: 'redirect'
permalink: /a
redir_to: 'http://example.com'
sitemap: false
---
_layouts/redirect.html based on Redirect from an HTML page :
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Redirecting...</title>
{% comment %}
Don't use 'redirect_to' to avoid conflict
with the page redirection plugin: if that is defined
it takes over.
{% endcomment %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ page.redir_to }}"/>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url={{ page.redir_to }}" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Redirecting...</h1>
<a href="{{ page.redir_to }}">Click here if you are not redirected.<a>
<script>location='{{ page.redir_to }}'</script>
</body>
</html>
Like this example, the redirect-from plugin does not generate 301s, only meta + JavaScript redirects.
We can verify what is going on with:
curl localhost:4000/a