MovableType, Blogging, and Search Engine Optimization

4 Nov 2005 at 14:39 by Joshua J. Steimle

I like the MovableType platform for blogging, now that I've learned it. It sure was a pain to set up though. I wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't technically inclined. But now that I've learned it I can't use anything else because I've made this huge investment of time.

Anyway, I just learned something new today that may be of assistance to others with regards to the MT system and search engine optimization.

When I first created my www.donloper.com site and my skateboard blog I had the path set up so that all the archives were stored in an archives directory. So to access a posting you would be looking at a url like this:

www.donloper.com/archives/business_entrepreneurship/whatever_someth.html

The first thing I figured out was how to prevent MT from cutting my filenames short, since I want to make sure all my keywords are in the filename. This was done by going to the "Archive Files" section of the Weblog Config in MT and where it says "Individual Entry Archive" and it has a field for an Archive File Template you paste in this code:

<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.html

Then I decided that having the word "archives" in my urls wasn't doing me any goood. It just makes the links longer and puts in a word that is useless. So under Core Setup I changed the local archive path as well as the archive url. They are as follows now:

/home/4766/domains/theorganicseo.com/html/

http://www.donloper.com/

What I didn't know what that all my archive files are still out there. You see, the MT system creates actual files for all your postings. So I still had an "archives" directory, and all those files were still out on the internet, even if you couldn't get to them through my site. So they stayed indexed in Google and other search engines.

I was confused because I would check my rankings in Google using WebCEO and these pages were still coming up, although they were falling. But I couldn't figure out why they were still ranked. Finally today I clicked on a link from Google to one of them and it was still live, and that's when I realized all those files were still there, even though I had changed the status to "draft" for all of them.

So I downloaded the archives directory from my sites via FTP just to make sure I had the files in case I wanted them in the future, and then I deleted the archives directory from the server. Now I'm hoping that Google will drop those files from it's index and index the files in their new spots. We'll see how that goes.

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