Should I "dirify" my blogs?

Will I lose or gain by converting numeric pagenames in large archive?

[michael heraghty]

I run a few different blog-style sites, at least one of which has quite a large archive (100+ entries) now, and does fairly well in SERPs.

When I installed the publishing tool (Movable Type), I did not use the "dirify" feature, so the pages got default numeric names like "000036.html". At that time, I wasn't using keywords in filenames boosts results. Many of the archived entries now have backlinks.

MT's "dirify" feature will allow me to republish all of those archived files, using their titles as filenames. Each of the words in the title will be separated by an underscore (although the perl code can be modified so that hyphens are used instead).

What I'd like advice on is:

Should I go ahead and dirify all of my archived entries?

Or should I simply dirify from now on (this will be tricky to implement -- one fasle click and all the old files could be republished with the new template!)?

-- Michael

[ciml]

Firstly, I wouldn't suggest keyword loading URLs for Google as it makes such little difference.

If you do want to have Google see keywords in URLs, "-"s are treated as spaces but "_"s aren't. So /blue_widget will only match searches for 'blue_widget' not 'blue widgets'.

[michael heraghty]

Thanks ciml!

I suspected that it made little difference, as individual entries were already performing well. I'll take you're advice and leave things as they are.

[ThatAdamGuy]

A warning on MT!

If you ever move to a new server and simply export/re-import your entries, they'll all be given different URLs! :( I found this out the hard way. MT does NOT save unique IDs for each entry.

On the other hand, using dirified entry titles may also be a bad idea. If you ever go back and change an entry title, then the URL changes, too. Ack!

So the best idea I've come up with so far is to create a filename/URI based upon a date/time stamp (including second), like this:

mysite.com/archives/0309111410.htm

This will never change (since it's based upon the original timestamp, and editing doesn't affect it), and it will be preserved if I change servers down the road again.

[michael heraghty]

TAG -- About moving servers: that's really good to know as I was due to move an MT powered site in the next few days. I'll have to rethink now!

[benc007]

ciml,

Is there a limit to how many keyword named pages I can have for a domain?

eg.
keyword1-keyword2-keyword3_1.html
keyword1-keyword2-keyword3_2.html
keyword1-keyword2-keyword3_3.html
keyword1-keyword2-keyword3_4.html
keyword1-keyword2-keyword3_5.html ...

[ciml]

You can have lots of them. If they're substantially duplicate or autogenerated content, then a search engine's human reviewer might take a dim view.

Note that URLs like that only match people searching for "keyword1-keyword2-keyword3_1", not "keyword1 keyword2" or whatever. Also, that URLs don't have much weight in Google anyway.