Does Google *REALLY* Love WordPress? Probably NOT. Here's Why...

[Johnny12345]

(NOTE: WordPress and SEO experts -- PLEASE feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong or missing something important!)


OK, let's get down to business...

How many times have you heard people claim that Google "loves WordPress"? Dozens? Hundreds? More than that?

But here's the thing...

I can find absolutely NOTHING "magical" or special about WordPress that would cause Google to favor it.

In my view, as far as the Big G is concerned, a blog is just a group of web pages with...

* An RSS feed
* Pinging
* Regularly updated content (posts and/or comments)
* A site map
* About, privacy, and contact pages
* Well-structured navigation (meaning the site is divided into logical, hyper-linked sections using keywords)

Add those things to ANY static website and I suspect that Google will love your HTML website as much as the typical WordPress blog.

In fact, it may love your static site even MORE.

Why?

Because static HTML pages don't need "plug-ins" to overcome problems with their title and meta tags.

In addition, plain HTML pages don't (typically) use a database-driven link structure like blogs. You'll rarely see static websites use page names like "www.domain-name.com/?=456". But, by default, WordPress does. And those sorts of paths tend to stop web crawlers dead in their tracks.

Finally, with most static sites, there is no concern over having "duplicate content." You see... Google probably does NOT like it when you have the same content, on the same URL, in multiple places -- which is common with WordPress (and other blogs) that aren't properly set up.

WordPress is great as a content management system or blog -- but I see NO advantage whatsoever to using it for sales letter pages, mini-sites, or virtually any other type of site.

Long live static pages!

-John

P.S. Once again... am I wrong about this?

[mark587905]

Hi

Using /%postname% in your permalink structure allows posts names to be in the title.

In all honesty I agree with you on the sales page but there are so many easily integrated plugins I love WP. Maybe one day I will go back to static html pages but not at the moment.

[mathmo]

mark587905, be very careful with that... & I certainly wouldn't go around recommending people do that! [or at least not without appropriate clauses]

If you have more than a very small number of pages your site can take a major performance hit.

More info:
Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful » Otto on WordPress
[wp-testers] Wordpress scaling problems

And yeah, Johnny12345 is wrong too as any competent wordpress developer wouldn't have those issues which he raised (if they even all are "issues"... which is a matter of open debate amongst SEO practitioners). Heck, you won't even need plugins in most instances he brought up as wordpress even takes care of most of this automatically itself in the most recent version (when did you last use wordpress?).

Oh, and meta tags is pretty outdated when it comes to SEO.... but I see you mentioned it.

Originally Posted by Johnny12345

(NOTE: WordPress and SEO experts -- PLEASE feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong or missing something important!)

Yes I will/have

Originally Posted by Johnny12345

I can find absolutely NOTHING "magical" or special about WordPress that would cause Google to favor it.

In my view, as far as the Big G is concerned, a blog is just a group of web pages with...

* An RSS feed
* Pinging
* Regularly updated content (posts and/or comments)
* A site map
* About, privacy, and contact pages
* Well-structured navigation (meaning the site is divided into logical, hyper-linked sections using keywords)

You could find nothing magical? Boy you just wrote a pretty big list of why wordpress is magically good! And that is only scratching the surface of what is good about wordpress...

Originally Posted by Johnny12345

Add those things to ANY static website and I suspect that Google will love your HTML website as much as the typical WordPress blog.

Yes, but why on earth would I go to the trouble of doing that when Wordpress is ALREADY doing that for me

Originally Posted by Johnny12345

WordPress is great as a content management system or blog -- but I see NO advantage whatsoever to using it for sales letter pages, mini-sites, or virtually any other type of site.

Seriously?? The ONLY advantage to not using wordpress for landing pages / mini sites / and others would be IF you could do it a lot faster as a static page than a wordpress page.

Now as it is faster with wordpress (AND you get a lot of other advantages built in too), the only way it could be faster to make a static page is if the person has only made static pages and hasn't put in the effort to learn how to effectively harness the power of wordpress.

Which I'd highly recommend they do, as if they seeing themselves doing IM for even another six months (which I assume we all do) then they'll get a ten fold repayment from the investment in learning wordpress.

Originally Posted by Johnny12345

Long live static pages!

Sorry, they didn't live past the 1990's. Mid 2000's at the very best.

Originally Posted by Johnny12345

P.S. Once again... am I wrong about this?

Yes, very. Sorry.

[Johnny12345]

mathmo,

* That's a good point about the permalink path -- I'll keep that in mind.

* Expert developers probably would NOT have SEO issues. But I'm really thinking about WordPress novices (like me). Plain HTML with CSS still seems easier to me because there are NO databases or plug-ins to contend with.

* You're probably right about meta tags. Title tags are far more important. However, I don't know that ALL the search engines ignore them. But I could be wrong.

* Your points are well taken. However, all of the functions I pointed out could be easily done on a static site. None of them are difficult. So even though it's nice that WordPress does them, it's not that much work to do it manually.

* With just a tiny bit of PHP or ASP.NET code, regular HTML sites can be extremely useful. I think the thing I like is that I can open a text file and see ALL of the code that makes the site work. With WordPress, you have to trust the software to some extent.

* I'm NOT saying I don't like WordPress. However, for a single-page sales letter, it just seems like overkill. Of course, opinions vary.

John

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by mathmo

If you have more than a very small number of pages your site can take a major performance hit.

Maybe if you have 50K pages but I have several WP sites with 500-2000 pages that don't seem to have any noticeable performance problems at all using postname or category/postname structures.

There is a tendency though to pile on performance stealing plugin or method on top of each other so it could add up to a performance hit.

[notjustseo]

Such a great, and yet pointless arguement. Both can and do work, it just depends on which you are more comfortable with. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, but obviously WP is the more scalable model for someone who is going to build lots of big sites.

[FamilyFrugal]

My very very novice opinion? Google certainly loves wordpress more than blogger. I recently started a self hosted wordpress blog and hit the search engines within 24 hours (ranking on page 9).

My blogger blog? I've had to fight for every teensy creep up the charts.

[mad.hat]

Yes, you are wrong about this. Yeah, you can easily do a lot of things that WordPress automatically does but... WordPress AUTOMATICALLY does them! Also, you MUST have a robust CMS if you're not a network security professional. WordPress is a very robust CMS and most of its flaws are known and easy to protect against intrusion.

Oh and if you don't think that having a robust CMS is important than you have never ranking for a competitive term. Try protecting against ddos with static html pages. Yeah, its a blackhat way to rank but just because we don't do it doesn't mean that others can't do it to us.

[socialbookmark]

Originally Posted by FamilyFrugal

My very very novice opinion? Google certainly loves wordpress more than blogger. I recently started a self hosted wordpress blog and hit the search engines within 24 hours (ranking on page 9).
My blogger blog? I've had to fight for every teensy creep up the charts.

I totally disagree you. Google loves its products more than anything
Blogger posts are indexing within minutes but wordprss blogs are indexing a little later. It my experience. But totally the speed of indexing pages depends on the quality of website/blog not the platform they are using.

[jalicia18]

You can edit the setting for permalink or url friendly. Setting -> Permalink -> try to select the radio button . you can select what you want in using url like this domain.com/blog/11/11/blahblah/

[whateverpedia]

The mere act of installing Wordpress on a domain gets the googlebot to visit.