What is the best approach for redirection of old p

Question

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.

Answer 1

Jekyll has gone through some major updates in the past few months, so maybe this wasn't possible when this question was originally posted...

Jekyll supports a permalink attribute in the YAML front-matter section of your blog posts. You can specify the URL that you would like your post to have and Jekyll will use that (instead of the filename) when generating your site.

---
title: My special blog post
permalink: /programovani/2010/04/git-co-to-je-a-co-s-tim
---
My blog post markdown content

Answer 2

Since github doesn't allow 301 redirects (which isn't surprising), you'll have to make a decision between moving to your new URL structure (and taking a search engine hit) or leaving the URLs the way they are. I suggest you go ahead and make the move. Let the search engine chips fall where they may. If someone hits one of your old links via the search engine, they'll be redirected to the new location. Over time, the search engines will pick up your changes.

Something you can do to help matters is to create a Sitemap where you only list your new pages and not the old ones. This should speed up the replacement of old URLs with the new ones. Additionally, if all your old URLs are in your '/programovani' directory, you can also use a robots.txt file to tell future crawls they should ignore that directory. For example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /programovani/

It will take a little while for the search engines to catch up with the changes. This isn't really a big deal. As long as the old URLs still exist and redirect actual people to the active pages, you'll be fine.