What is the best approach for redirection of old pages in Jekyll and GitHub Pages?

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

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