Migrating to a new site

My current Jekyll site is for my company, Cambermast. However, my Agile in Action podcast is on that same site.

Currently, if you go to my podcast site, it simply redirects to the Cambermast.com and drops you into the podcast page on that site.

Since the podcast is going really well, I want to create a standalone site with its own unique design. Therefore I’m planning to create a whole new Jekyll site just for the podcast.

The challenge I’m having now is what to do about those podcast links on Cambermast.

Here is my current plan, and I would appreciate it if you have any other ideas:

  1. In the new podcast site, create the same url/folder structure and copy over the posts and media content, like images.
  2. In the Cambermast website, leave all the pages to the podcasts, but use meta refresh (or JavaScript?) to send the user to the podcast site. It should be easy to recreate the URL since it uses the same folder structure.
  3. I do use Bit.ly, so we can manually update those links.
  4. For all future posts, only add them to the new podcast site.

The only serious issue I see with this plan relates to the posts. Old posts will still be on Cambermast and also on the new podcast site. That could screw with search engine optimization.

What do you think? Is there a better approach that might be more sustainable?

Thanks!

Some ideas

  • Use redirect plugin for Jekyll. I don’t know if it works with JS or making a 301.
  • Use JS on the page as you mentioned. You can clear existing content off.
  • keep just the heading and maybe opening a paragraph and then a manual click link.
  • if you decide to use a paragraph or the entire original article on the old page, this won’t hurt your SEO ranking if you add a meta tag pointing at the new page. Dev.to actually has this built in so you can reference your “original” post with a user facing link and crawler facing metatag to avoid getting penalized for dup content
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<link rel=“canonical” 
    href=“https://example.com/sample-page/” />

From this article, including answers from a Google expert

It says you should use absolute URLs when linking between pages on the same domain and also you can put a link on the original page to itself if you want.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the great responses! I was delayed in getting back to you as I added the page to my weekend reading list :-). Okay, thank you I will use canonical tags, which I did not know were a thing until today, and re-direct users from the original page. Thanks again!

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