Writer's block, an owner's guide: Movable Type and Google

I noticed that, while other major search engines drop in here daily, Google is still listing pages that haven’t existed for months, and is not listing the new things I’ve been posting day by day over those months. And it seems to me that the difference is that recently, for practical reasons of my own, I’ve been giving pages numbers (151.html) rather than meaningful names (movable_type_and_google.html). So I’ve used Movable Type’s useful automation facilities to change every address on the site into a name. I’ve also used them to create redirects from every one of the old addresses. If you notice anything wrong with the result… well, you’re probably not reading this, but if you were I’d appreciate hearing from you. Thanks.

Published on May 14, 2005 at 3:46 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/movable-type-and-google.html

2 Comments

FWIW, I’ve read that Google prefers dashes to underscores in URLs. If you wanted to give that a whirl, you could use the dashify or dirifyplus plugin to incorporate the dashes. Please pardon the unsolicited advice from a total stranger. (I followed a link from the MT forums to check out your breadcrumbs… very nice.)

Comment by kate — May 17, 2005 @ 1:10 pm
Thanks! I hadn’t heard that one. I prefer dashes myself - easy to read as well as easy to type. I have learned the hard way that dashes in folder names break Movable Type (but dashes in folder names aren’t what you were suggesting).

Comment by McJung — May 18, 2005 @ 3:32 pm