Movable Type upgrade and url keywords

is dirifyplus a plus or a minus?

[utica]

I upgraded movable type from 2.63 to 3.17.

The archive urls in 2.63 ended in a number.html (/001234.html)

The upgrade takes the title of the post, up to a certain number of characters, and adds an underscore. (/title_of_pos.html)

A plugin called dirifyplus will take the full title and allow you to add hyphens rather than underscores. (/title-of-post-without-it-being-cut-short.html)

Does the last example make for good SEO? Is it considered spamming? Would the second example, the cutoff title with underscores, be better. Is it better to just have a number.html?

I'm also assuming that once I make the update to the site that I should use 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Is that correct?

[bether2]

I use dirifyplus. However, I don't let it take the whole title and make a long file name.

Instead, I put a shortened title (with appropriate keywords) in the title section of the "Create New Entry" form. Dirifyplus takes this title and makes the file name.

I put the "real" title at the top of the "Entry Body" section of the New Entry form - with the appropriate html for font size and bolding. Add a <br> or two and put the body of your post below this.

It's been working out well for me.

[j_h_maccann]

dirifyplus is a big win. You can either use it as

<$MTEntryTitle dirifyplus="pld" trim_to="15"$>.htm

or

<$MTEntryBasename dirifyplus="pld"$>.htm

with much the same effect (check the Movable Type
docs for the differences).

The big question is why Movable Type would persist in
inserting underscores in file names, when that is clearly
wrong (per GoogleGuy). The effect of the dirifyplus
plugin should have been in the new release.

[NotTheMSM]

I forget exactly why I couldn't get dirifyplus to work. It might have been because I was using a very old version. I just searched the source for dirify and changed the underscore to a dash.

In a newer version that's in lib/MT/Util.pm.

Change:

$s =~ tr!!_!s;

to:

$s =~ tr!!-!s;

[bether2]

Oh, I forgot to mention: I don't use the MT title tag at all in my templates. So just my "real" title (in the body section) is displayed in the log entry. And I avoid the superlong filenames that dirifyplus would make.

Does the last example make for good SEO? Is it considered spamming? Would the second example, the cutoff title with underscores, be better. Is it better to just have a number.html?

Of the threee choices, I would guess number.html and the superlong hyphenated filename are a tie for least desirable and "the cutoff title with underscores" is better. And the method I use is the best, imho. :)