Does Wordpress hurt your rankings?

[StiflersMom]

What Taktical, Madoctopus and Biscut said.

It's just a matter of fact that 1) WP is very easy to setup and optimize 2) most IM guys, especially those who joined the game just recently (0-3 years ago) ... have not even tried a different CMS or created a website without CMS.


As long as you properly optimize (onpage) your site and give each page a unique <title> tag, you should be able to rank it, almost regardless of the cms used.
Duplicate titles were a major drawback some time ago causing many pages of a site to end up in the supplemental results

 

[madoctopus]

Out of the box WP does not support:

• Custom page titles (can be done with plugins)
• Meta description & keywords
• Permalinks like /category/ and /category/post/ (can be done with plugin but u have to modify plugin for best result)
• Any advanced stuff
• Permalinks are not very flexible. Can be configured with plugins but having permalinks like /postname/ affects performance because WP is designed by drunk kindergarten kids.
• Also, by default tag pages and search result pages are indexable which is VERY BAD! Again this can be changes using plugins like HeadSpace 2 (which btw is better than Platinum SEO and other SEO-related plugins).

Leaving aside that, 99% of the WP themes have bad markup. They have the blog title as H1 tag on every page which affects SEO quite a lot, then all panels in the sidebars have H2 or H3 titles though optimally would be to have no semantic meaning so the H2 and H3 inside the post have more weight. Basically this lowers on-page relevance of your keywords by diluting it with words as "categories", "clouds", etc. I think Google wa ssmart enough to make an exception for WP in its algorithm and not take these into consideration, so maybe it does not dilute your relevance after all.

Going into WP architecture you will soon discover it is VERY VERY SLOW. You may think it is not, but trust me. I am a PHP web developer with over 10 years experience and WP's database is poorly designed and not properly optimized and the PHP code itself is one of the worst architected and implemented applications I have ever seen. It takes about the same time to WP to render a page as it takes to Drupal, yet Drupal is an A LOT more flexible and does A LOT more processing (but is not as easy to use).

Leaving WP itself aside, many WP plugins are built by other drunk kindergarten kids. Again performance suffers and sometimes security too. For example if you have 5 plugins and all have to inject CSS, they will inject markup to load 5 different CSS files. That increases the page load time. Same thing with JavaScript.

Yes, WP is easy to use. Yes sites based on WP do rank. That does not mean Google loves WP or that WP sites perform better than others. What you think about WP is irrelevant. If you like something it doesn't mean it is the best or better than something else. Only that you like it. Show me a WP site and I will show you between 5 to 20+ things that can be improved in the on-site SEO. Also, if you only had experience with WP but no other CMS platforms and/or custom-built sites and static HTML sites, you don't really have foundation for your opinion when you say WP is great.

And I am not even going into details about why Google might not like a blog for certain keywords. A blog is a site but a site is not just a blog. Imagine you are cNet, Amazon or some other huge site. You think you can deliver best user experience using a blog? No.

 

[verilix]

lol @ Wordpress hurting rankings. So many big blogs use Wordpress and rank top 3 for every post they make. If that were true, imagine the sites not using Wordpress.

 

[Yukinari84]

Guys:

I have read in different posts that using wordpress hurts you to rank well in G?

Is this true? and why?

I disagree 100%.

WP is probably one of the best platforms for rankings.

One of the main reasons a lot of people were starting to talk about WP hurting rankings is because of a WSO report that came out that was basically building hype around that subject.

Totally false IMHO.

 

[Devious]

Wordpress is one of the best things you can do for rankings. All of my sites are Wordpress based.

 

[madoctopus]

lol @ Wordpress hurting rankings. So many big blogs use Wordpress and rank top 3 for every post they make. If that were true, imagine the sites not using Wordpress.

They rank because of the links. If you throw enough links at a shitty site it will rank #1 for whatever keyword you want.

As I said, give me the URL of a WP blog and I show you a bunch of bad on-site SEO elements.

You (as well as many people) have a messed up view on "cause & effect" and "if X then Y" implication. These are called fallacies. They don't take into account a lot of other factors that make the site rank well.

1. "If a site ranks high and uses WP => WP helps you rank high" - fallacy
2. "I use WP, I have great rankings => Google loves WP" - fallacy
3. etc...

If you use WP without heavy customization, even if you use SEO plugins and stuff, if I make a static HTML it will rank higher than your WP site, all other things being equal. As a matter of fact, if I have every link you have and I can use the internal linking structure I want and content with worse keyword density than your WP site, I still outrank your WP blog. I can guarantee you that!

 

[King of Rock]

Complete rookie question here, so bear with me my friends. Why do peeps prefer WP over Blogger? Seems like everyone uses WP and I never hear about Blogger...okay now everyone can laugh outloud :rockon:

Thanks!~Mike

 

[Strondahl]

Complete rookie question here, so bear with me my friends. Why do peeps prefer WP over Blogger? Seems like everyone uses WP and I never hear about Blogger...okay now everyone can laugh outloud :rockon:

Thanks!~Mike

WP allows far more customization. The downside is that you need to pay for hosting.

 

[blackhatballer]

I would have to disagree with you 100% adventurouslover. Big G likes WP and it is easier to get indexed and ranked with WP. I rank well with WP but you still have to do your SEO optimization. It is not like Big G is going to just give you ranking for using WP, Joomla, etc. You still have to put in your work. I have noticed as we all have that Big G is loving Keyword name specific sites with the new Panda update and it is a unfair advantage if you can get a keyword name niche website. It makes getting it ranked higher a lot easier than before. They are trimming the bottom feeders and are more focused on Authority & Quality websites now. So if anything focus on building a Authority website and Optimize like a mad man.

 

[izerman]

Probably some breaking news from WF

Haha made me smile.
It probably is breaking news on WF.
/Izerman

 

[King of Rock]

WP allows far more customization. The downside is that you need to pay for hosting.

Ahaa, more customization to ad more pages and better content I assume. Thanks for the quick response and answer Strondahl.

I have a blogspot for my photography biz that is on page one and could not figure out why WP was prefered. My thinking was Blogspot= owned by Google and free hosting..now I know, more custom action with WP.

If anyone else has info or suggested threads feel free to let me know!

Thanks again! ~Mike

 

[moonlighsunligh]

ha anyone notices that wordpress categories ranks much lover than posts?

 

[MKelly]

Out of the box WP does not support:

• Custom page titles (can be done with plugins)
• Meta description & keywords
• Permalinks like /category/ and /category/post/ (can be done with plugin but u have to modify plugin for best result)
• Any advanced stuff
• Permalinks are not very flexible. Can be configured with plugins but having permalinks like /postname/ affects performance because WP is designed by drunk kindergarten kids.
• Also, by default tag pages and search result pages are indexable which is VERY BAD! Again this can be changes using plugins like HeadSpace 2 (which btw is better than Platinum SEO and other SEO-related plugins).

Leaving aside that, 99% of the WP themes have bad markup. They have the blog title as H1 tag on every page which affects SEO quite a lot, then all panels in the sidebars have H2 or H3 titles though optimally would be to have no semantic meaning so the H2 and H3 inside the post have more weight. Basically this lowers on-page relevance of your keywords by diluting it with words as "categories", "clouds", etc. I think Google wa ssmart enough to make an exception for WP in its algorithm and not take these into consideration, so maybe it does not dilute your relevance after all.

Going into WP architecture you will soon discover it is VERY VERY SLOW. You may think it is not, but trust me. I am a PHP web developer with over 10 years experience and WP's database is poorly designed and not properly optimized and the PHP code itself is one of the worst architected and implemented applications I have ever seen. It takes about the same time to WP to render a page as it takes to Drupal, yet Drupal is an A LOT more flexible and does A LOT more processing (but is not as easy to use).

Leaving WP itself aside, many WP plugins are built by other drunk kindergarten kids. Again performance suffers and sometimes security too. For example if you have 5 plugins and all have to inject CSS, they will inject markup to load 5 different CSS files. That increases the page load time. Same thing with JavaScript.

Yes, WP is easy to use. Yes sites based on WP do rank. That does not mean Google loves WP or that WP sites perform better than others. What you think about WP is irrelevant. If you like something it doesn't mean it is the best or better than something else. Only that you like it. Show me a WP site and I will show you between 5 to 20+ things that can be improved in the on-site SEO. Also, if you only had experience with WP but no other CMS platforms and/or custom-built sites and static HTML sites, you don't really have foundation for your opinion when you say WP is great.

And I am not even going into details about why Google might not like a blog for certain keywords. A blog is a site but a site is not just a blog. Imagine you are cNet, Amazon or some other huge site. You think you can deliver best user experience using a blog? No.

That's all well and good... but for PHP coders who can easily make and customise their own themes, most of these problems (DB architecture aside) can be solved easily, and the database speed can become irrelevant to the user if you set things up to serve a cached HTML page.

I also feel that my custom themes rank better - they are original nobody has a website like any of mine.

For these reasons, I love WordPress.

The .css and Javascript you mentioned annoy me too, I hate it when I view a sites source and there's three .css files and inline css and javascript all over the place.

They have the blog title as H1 tag on every page which affects SEO quite a lot

Things like this is what can trap SEO's into title spamming their sites with an identical h1 tag on every page, but again, it's something that an 'if > else' statement can solve for the more savvy users.

WordPress is great, but like the man said, it's not an automatic SEO machine, some basic PHP tweaks and smart choices of plugins can improve things a hell of a lot.

 

[MKelly]

ha anyone notices that wordpress categories ranks much lover than posts?

That's no coincidence, since the category pages by default show only duplicated content from the original posts.

Quick tip, go into your categories and put it a great, useful description, a couple of paragraphs.

Then go into your theme and before the loop on the category page, put in:

<?php echo category_description(); ?>

and there you have it, some useful original content on your category pages, not found anywhere else on your blog.

 

[moonlighsunligh]

That's no coincidence, since the category pages by default show only duplicated content from the original posts.

Quick tip, go into your categories and put it a great, useful description, a couple of paragraphs.

Then go into your theme and before the loop on the category page, put in:

<?php echo category_description(); ?>

and there you have it, some useful original content on your category pages, not found anywhere else on your blog.

I already done that. I use custom template and a wordpress category doesn't rank well, even if i add a unique article and i do noot show posts excerpts at all. Post ourank them pretty quickly.

It looks like category pages, no matter what content they have, are by default in google algo marked as bad pages.

But the problem is that even home pages on blog (just unique article - no post shown) have similar problem.

 

[psytrance]

Plain and simple

However...
imo if you want to build big site wordpress helps a lot.

 

[psytrance]

Actually I think the OP was trying to discuss relative rankings for different platforms. If that's what you're asking about, then Google actually tends to rank Joomla sites more easily than Wordpress sites. I have tested this and its been confirmed by several respected members.

However Wordpress will usually do the job also. And its a little easier to use.

This is so true... I agree with you.

But if people want to use wordpress then there are some plugins that MUST be installed. all in one seo, for example.

By the way joomla = pain

 

[procam]

Guys:

I have read in different posts that using wordpress hurts you to rank well in G?

Is this true? and why?

Don't listen to those WP haters! That's a lie, 100% lie ... WordPress is the most flexible when it come to SEO and G loves blogs. That all there is to it, the rest is for the birds.

Good luck!

 

[Theproof2]

That is not true lol

 

[charto03]

worse thread ever....p.s. test for yourself you shouldnt give a RA as to what others say test for yourself....hence my no opinion comment to your question. I know the answer but perhaps it's only held true in all of the experiments I have tested.