Moving to MT - lose seo ground?

I am moving the 100+ blogs on my site from Blogger to Movable Type. I have to do this because Blogger isn't sophisticated enough to handle what I'm doing and MT can handle unlimited blogs and user management, etc.

My concern is that I have 1000+ individual post pages indexed by Google. When they move to MT, the URLs will change. Do I have to put a 301 redirect on every single post page in order to keep them in Google? Would I need to keep the redirect on them forever? I will basically have double the amount of files on my server, then, which I don't want.

Also, moving the blogs, it seems like they have to go in individual directories, whereas now I have them as just www. site.com/blogA.htm and www. site.com/blogB.htm etc...

Has anybody else here made the transition from one blogging system to another and have any tips for me? It's going to be so cool when I get it all set up, but I am dreading it.

 

I'm going to be making the transition myself soon...

TwisterMC has just made the move (From blogspot to WordPress hosted on his own site).

I have been thinking about the 301 issue too...

Not too sure if there is a quicker way of achieveing it to be honest.

 

this is a tough situation, and i'm not sure what the best course of action really is.

Can you redirect folders?
Say everything that was in domain.com/bloggerarchive/ can be redirected to domain.com/mtarchive/ ?
That would save you time in creating redirects.

And do you think Google is smart enough to know that when 100's of pages are missing on a domain, but 100's of others show up, that there was a major overhaul and to reindex that site completely and quickly?

anyone know any of these answers?

 

I think I made a big mistake by not putting each blog in its own folder. This is going to be such a nightmare!