WP sucks when it comes to SEO. If you say otherwise, you lack basic understanding of on-page SEO. However if a site gets indexed faster or gets PR faster is a matter of backlinks (external factor) not the platform itself. The only areas where the CMS plays a role in the SEO aspect are the ones that do with on-page optimization, including information architecture (includes internal linking architecture). WP by default is one of the worst CMS' ever built when it comes to on-page SEO factors and I will tell you why.
- Serious duplicate content problems - in most cases due to tag pages and archive (by date) pages. I know cases where making the tag pages noindex increased rankings and traffic.
- URL structure is not too great because it is not flexible enough by default.
- 99.9% of the themes are done the wrong way. Even the official recommendation from the WP team for the markup to use is wrong. To be more specific, in the sidebars they use heading tags (H2 in most cases) as the title of the sidebar sections/panels. H tags have semantic meaning and search engines gives more weight to the text in them. Having H2 tags in all pages with the same text is unhealthy because it dilutes the relevancy of the keywords you are targeting. Also, most themes have the blog title in a H1 on every page not just the homepage and the post title in a H2. The post title should be in a H1 and the blog title in inner pages should be in a semantically neutral tag as DIV.
- Information architecture in most WP sites is bad for big sites and worse for small ones (little content). This is related to the duplicate content problem mentioned at point (1).
- Though this has a minimal impact on rankings, after you add plugins to a WP blog, you may end up with multiple CSS and JS files being loaded instead of just one. This increases pageload time which is a low-importance SEO factor for Google.
- No meta description and meta keywords by default and you can't have a different page title than the post title (in some cases you may want that).
Most of these problems can be fixed with plugins except for the semantically incorrect markup that has to do with the theme, which you have to fix manually.
Don't bother arguing against what I said here. If you think WP is "better than others" in terms of SEO, you are wrong. Go learn basic on-page SEO instead.
Leaving SEO aside, WP is a blog platform not a site platform. If you want to make money a blog is not the best converting system to use. You can still use WP successfully but it takes some heavy customization. All my sites are on WP, but they don't look like blogs at all. They look more like cNet and similar sites. Then again, the latest platform that I built on WP3 (theme with custom posts types + custom fields + custom taxonomies) took me over a month to develop (because the WP developers are morons who can't code in an architecturally sane way not even to save their life). If you want a solid architectural foundation look at Drupal. It is a b|tch to learn (very difficult) but is the best CMS ever built. That is why many top tier sites like MTV, Barnes&Noble, etc. use it. Then again, unless you're good with PHP and are willing to do massive custom coding, stay away from it because you won't find many nice themes for it for free. Anyway, this is not a WP vs Drupal thing, both have their advantages and disadvantages and clearly from the perspective of the speed of deployment and ease of use WP is a winner. However, I see so many people saying WP is great in this and that way and frankly that to me is an indicator of "follow the pack" mentality.
If you're in a market/niche with average or high competition (and I don't mean number of competitors but the strength of the few top ones), you're using a WP site and wondering why you're not ranking or converting better then competitors, its probably because you have a blog and they have a
site. If you don't understand the difference and why that matters, I will put it to you succinctly like this: blog is to site like bread is to a dish. You can't eat just bread and say you had a great tasty dish can you? You also need some meat, vegetables, spices and mix them in a specific way to get something great.
