martink333 - 12:21 am on Jan 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

Interesting conversations here. I started using blogging software on my main site about two years ago, first Blogger then Moveabletype (MT). About six months ago I converted all of my static pages onto onto MT, using it as a content management system that has made it easier for me to keep the content updated, since I can make changes from whatever computer I'm at. I've tweaked MT so that the static pages have regular file names (often the same as the names I had before). Since MT creates static files everything looks the same to the search engines and I've maintained my PR 7 rank.

Being an MT fan I converted my mostly-ignored personal site to a blog, mostly of religious issues. I'm getting a lot of interesting search engine traffic from searches I would never even think of. Google likes the site: four days ago I made a post whose title included two small religious movements and if you type their names into Google now my post comes up number 1. This is very nice from a SEO viewpoint, but also nice from the content side: since the posts allow comments I can now encourage a conversation between the two movements.

One warning though: by default Movabletype lists each blog entry as a number. When I switched servers recently, something must have happened, because all of the numbers changed. For a month or so Google was sending everyone to the wrong pages. Even worse, I had cross-linked my own site and all these links were broken! Yuck. I got complaints, let me assure you. I've now given my major posts static names made up of my keywords--I make up a PHP file that is simply an include for the numbered MT post. If the numbers ever go wrong again, I just have to replace the numbers of those PHP files.