Don't Break Links

Breaking links will cause linkrot.

• If you are a blogger and want to protect from this you can link via The Wayback Machine, but this then doesn’t give a link PageRank boost from Google if you are someone who cares about that kind of stuff.
  • I like using something like Quotebacks and driving traffic to the original site/author, so I don’t really do this a lot myself.

The best way to not break links is to not change your permalink structure.

• The best way to do this is to plan out your permalink structure ahead of time; simple and readable is usually better.
  • I have an article that touches on this a bit here.

If you do change, you should redirect to preserve old references as much as you can.

• If no one links to you but yourself then this is less of a problem, but how would you know?
  • If you can, you should definitely setup WebMentions which allows for “peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web”.
  • If you are on Google Search Console you can see what articles are linked to, or use Google with the intext search operator to look for links to your site.
    • This of course all depends on someone’s personal site being indexed by Google, which not everyone wants or has setup.
• If you host your own server, you’ll likely do redirects in your .htaccess.
  • If you’re using Jekyll like me, I will detail how I do it on my site below.

Redirecting in Jekyll

I recently remembered that an article of mine was linked in another article about SimpleJekyllSearch, but under my old URL scheme. Luckily for me, it is a very easy task to get redirects working in Jekyll/GitHub Pages. All you have to do is include jekyll-redirect-from in your plugins list, as it is included in the GitHub Pages plugins list.

In your post frontmatter, you just need to add the redirect from old URL like so:

layout: post
title: Search with SimpleJekyllSearch
slug: search-with-simplejekyllsearch
redirect_from: /garden/search-with-simplejekyllsearch/

It unfortunately doesn’t seem like you can use jekyll-redirect-from to create parameterized redirects like /garden/:slug to /posts/:slug. If you know how to do this then do let me know, but from what I’ve seen its mostly for one-offs. What you’ll likely have to do is what Jim did: write a script to create redirects for all your pages.