Back in 2002, when I switched from LiveJournal to Movable Type, I wrote a conversion tutorial. I had found the process rather difficult, but once I got it done it was easy to do it again and again. I offered free conversion for anybody who sent me their exported XML files, and one person was even so grateful he sent me a couple of books from my Amazon wishlist.
Anyway, I haven’t been getting many of those requests lately, but I did get a few over the weekend. One of them was someone notifying me of a broken link in the tutorial, and I thanked him. I mentioned that the tutorial was out of date because there are easier conversion methods now, and he wrote back asking what they might be. Apparently my tutorial is coming up very high on Google search results for conversion of LiveJournal to MT! I’ve noticed that with some other topics, too. I routinely get comments on my diet soda entry, and my intact hymen entry still gets comments once in a while. My very short entry about Jane Pauley’s urticaria got so many comments I had to turn them off, and the comments on Murder and Heaven are reasonably frequent.
Apparently, I have great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills, without even trying! I don’t know the first thing about SEO, despite having been an ODP editor since 1998 (wow, six years!). But my Google PageRank must be pretty damn good anyway, because I’m getting all these highly-positioned entries. Weird.
Page longevity is a much bigger factor than many people realize. It probably also helps that pages that stick around tend to be linked to, and past a certain point, the linkage tends to grow exponentially.