04
Nov
05

MovableType, Blogging, and Search Engine Optimization

By Joshua Steimle 4 Comments Categories: Marketing

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/4767/domains/donloper.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.

Related posts:

  1. Boston Search Engine Optimization
  2. Search Engine Optimization and Print Marketing = Risky
  3. The Difference Between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
  • http://www.sweeting.net Brian Sweeting

    You could always use mod_rewrite rules in a .htaccess file. That’s the way I redirect my old urls. You could try something like this:

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^archives/(.*)$ http://www.donloper.com/$1 [R=301]
    </IfModule>

    That should redirect anything to http://www.donloper.com/archives/* to http://www.donloper.com/* and the R=301 tells crawlers that it is a permanent redirect, so they’ll update their indexes.

  • http://www.donloper.com donloper

    Where exactly would you place this .htaccess file? Also, when I try to create a .htaccess file I get a Windows error saying “You must type a filename” because of having nothing before the “.” in .htaccess.

  • http://www.sweeting.net Brian Sweeting

    Oops, I’m on a Mac so I don’t have a problem creating them. If you’re using Windows, you may need to use a text/web editor that supports creating files that begin with a ‘.’ I know Dreamweaver does, and probably others like it. As for where to put the file, it would be in the root folder of your website. Another note: .htaccess files only work on Apache, so if you’re using IIS or some other web server, this won’t be of any use to you, but I see that donloper.com is hosted on an Apache web server. Most Apache configurations will allow you to use .htaccess files, but you may need to change your httpd.conf file and add ‘AllowOverride All’ inside the tags. A search of Google for htaccess should provide additional help if you need it.

  • http://www.donloper.com donloper

    Homesite also works. Notepad does not. As another little sidenote, depending on your FTP client, when you upload the .htaccess file you might not be able to see it. I use Absolute FTP (granted, not the latest version), and although the file has been uploaded and I have my client set to view dot files, I can’t see it, but I know it’s there because it’s working.

    One other note, for those of you who might be questioning whether the “root folder” Brian talks about is the actual directory called “root” or the main directory of your site, it’s the main directory of your site. Put the .htaccess file in the same directory where your index.html or equivalent file is for your homepage and it will work.