Penguin - ranking standard CSS Html sites vs WordPress sites

My problem is that after penguin all my new CSS html sites with no links dissapeared off the search engine while new wordpress sites with no links prospered they had no external SEO whatsoever yet.
I had a few sites that were ranked without any link juice whatsoever just based on great internet SEO and content.

All these sites had 0 external SEO campaigns, no scrapebox, no directories absolutely no linking
Site #1 - Html, CSS, Div. Great internal SEO all best practices including title text, meta etc. Keyword density about 3%.
Created after penguin, jumped to #6 for medium difficulty keyword when created, then gone off ranking

Site #2 - Html, CSS, Div. Great internal SEO all best practices including title text, meta etc. Keyword density about 3.5%.
Before penguin #1, 1, 3, 5 - for medium/easy keywords
After penguin - gone from results

Site #3 - Wordpress site, a bunch of seo optimization using plugins
Created after penguin same time as other html sites....medium difficulty keyword
- jumped to #7 in 4 days after creation, has now moved to #4 after 1 month of me doing nothing

I am assuming either some wordpress plugin I am using is complete fire for serps or the html sites need something added to them.

I am really confused right now in any case and im considering remaking the sites in wordpress for the easy Serps before I commit to link building a html page that might be dead already.

Anyone haveing the same problem? Any ideas?:drinking2


-Vlad

Google still loves Wordpress. Right now I am talking all my customers off getting a custom CSS HTML page instead of a custom wordpress template.

Mmmm so maybe I should consider just moving all the text content and remaking the site over a wordpress template. Sad that I put alot of work into making these html sites very appealing.

Also regarding seo clients I have if they have a css html page which all of them do right now its going to be harder to help them with ranking. I wonder if drupal 7 has a wordpress like effect...hmm will have to test.

Goog + Wordpress = Traffic, flawless equation that seems to outlast most updates.

Actually Google loves Quality. if you can stay in high Quality then you will never be in problem. And for my own view WordPress has made it easy and for this reason Google really got huge business. So its obvious that Google will always love WP.

Vladamir said:

Site #3 - Wordpress site, a bunch of seo optimization using plugins
Created after penguin same time as other html sites....medium difficulty keyword
- jumped to #7 in 4 days after creation, has now moved to #4 after 1 month of me doing nothing

I am assuming either some wordpress plugin I am using is complete fire for serps or the html sites need something added to them.

I am really confused right now in any case and im considering remaking the sites in wordpress for the easy Serps before I commit to link building a html page that might be dead already.

Anyone haveing the same problem? Any ideas?:drinking2


-Vlad

Click to expand...

What is the keyword density for you wp site
Thanks

I find it hard to believe that google favors wordpress over raw html. There are millions of sites ranking built using html. I just cant see G penalizing those sites. It makes no sense.

bobgoe said:

What is the keyword density for you wp site
Thanks

Click to expand...

What Plugins are you using if you dont mind me asking?

No matter if a site is wp or HTML or whatever CMS.
Matt cutts use wordpress for his blog

I agree there's no way I see Google penalizing a raw css html site. But over my experience ( I agree my sample size is really small) all things done similarly over about 15 websites my Wordpress sites do significantly better pre external SEO than my css html sites.

If I tried hard enough I could get the css html site into good ranking, that's not the question. I'm talking about after internal optimization and pre-external optimization. I think it comes down to the fact wordpress has a great arsenal of automated tools and plugins to make things go quickly. As an example -its a pain to manually ping a site every time you change something on a css html site and I usually forget rather than wordpress doing it for you via pingur plugin. Minifying your databases, auto resizing images, seo plugins, etc etc list goes on.

My conclusion is i'm going to remake my css sites using custom wordpress themes.

If anyone has any better suggestions for css html let me know.

Cheers!


Vlad

Actually, through testing, I have found the same thing. I have shited all of my main sites from CSS html over to Wp; for some reason Google loves it and seems to be sleeping with WP (or at least her sister).

One actual case study... html CSS site up for over a year, great on page SEO, no love. Within three days of shifting the site over to a WP blog, suddenly showing up on page 2 with no backlinking whatsoever.

yes, html sites are still ranking... And yes, there are some great html sites appearance wise... But my results indicate teh shift is necessary; even though I prefer creating html sites...

I usually don't pay too much attention to density and keep it around 3 but Interesting enough the keyword density for the site that jumped really high for the medium competition keyword now at #3 is 0, yes not making that up I do not have the keyword anywhere in the content nor on any image alt tags, the only place its located is in. 1. The title as an h1 tag so it shows up as both the first thing in content and h1. 2. Meta description

The density for the css html site thats refusing to rank in Google is 3.6%

Still doubt density matter much though because bringing anther sample site into the equation with 0 external seo using wordpress is now at #3 for a medium keyword term and has a density of 4%. The site was put up 2 months ago with 4 articles added within 2 weeks of it being up and has steadily moved up to #4 a few rankings a day. Traffic of 500 a month now.

It won't really be because of the wordpress or html background. It will be that wordpress sites tick more seo boxes, you may have some things on your wordpress sites that you are missing on your html sites so they are more search engine friendly.

Thanks Nato, confirmed my suspicions I too love creating css html sites. Any idea if (Drupal 7 gets any Google love?) by google love I mean is it easy to add seo modules to quickly manipulate your internal seo.

Regardless everything is moving to wordpress, I just wish some of my SEO clients could make the change.


-Vlad

No, Google is not favoring anyone (while they do, this is debatable), in general it's rather about the markup than the CMS brand. If your website is poorly coded or uses old semantics then you might not rank high. You need to read tips directly from Google.

op what is the plugin that you use for your wp site