Could Using Wordpress Be Damaging Your Business

As mentioned in my post it was a passing comment which I actually agreed with and thought ti warranted a thread to get other opinions.

Lets face it Google could pretty much wipe out most crap by filtering sites made with wordpress although it would be a rather wide sweep since many professional business's also use wordpress.

maybe wordpress is too big for Google to do this who knows

Kickin it on Amazon

Gaz Cooper
Amz Training Academy

Mine is speculation your post indicates you have information to back up your claim can you provide the link to the news flash

Kickin it on Amazon

Gaz Cooper
Amz Training Academy

This is why I only make plain text pages which are served over the gopher protocol.

It's not just HTML - I've heard they've got their eyes on PHP too

The trouble is, Big Mike doesn't speculate stupidly, he speculates rather cleverly. As for making logical sense, there's a possiblility you don't have Mikes's logic. (No rudeness intended, I doubt I have either).

Besides, people thought Google wouldn't do a lot of things but they did.

I'm not saying I agree or not but I'm with Fin anyway - Google can do what they like.

Who knows? Fortunately, I don't give a fig what Google, in its arrogance decides. It's been many a long year since I kowtowed to Google.

I love Wordpress and I shall continue using Wordpress. Virtually none of my traffic is Google dependent.

With all due respect.... Total nonsense.

Fundamentally, Wordpress is just a few pages of PHP, that have caught on and been as templates for thousands of sites. It is beautifully optimized out of the box to give Google all the information it needs to figure out what your site is about, and how relevant and unique it is.

Google loves Wordpress.
Matt Cutts himself has even said this.

Google doesn't hate bloggers OR affiliate marketers who have good content on their sites. If you have a Wordpress site with good content and natural backlinks, you will not be penalized by Google.

Googles prime concern with search is that people get the information they're looking for, and they're better than ever at doing that.
Gaming Google for profit is becoming less and less viable.

I see where you're coming from now, but I still don't think Google would go about it in such a way that would compromise all WP driven sites. They may start targeting rubbish sites in general, but there are far too many businesses and well-established websites created with wordpress, for them to come along and penalise them all.

Who knows though? As has been stated, Google can and will, do what they want.

First of all, who really cares? I'm not changing my site because Google wants me to.

If you get all your traffic/money from Google then that is your fault. You make it your primary means so you have to deal with whatever they do and want.

If people are that concerned, then worst case they could switch to Drupal.

If you looked you would see it's been re-posted 4 posts above yours... :confused:

What the heck does that ^^^ have to do with anything???

Or you could become an authority like Mashable (runs on WordPress), and give two hoots to what Google "fancies" to do.

Becoming someone like Mashable... well, that's a different story. Not the original point of interest of this thread anyway.

No, it's not all PHP in the end - Google doesn't even see the PHP. Every page served up is a static HTML page that was put together on the server.

Thanks for the link Louie, but i believe that video is 2009, ya know people have to think about all the Local Mom & Pop business sites run on wordpress etc. Matt Cutts even uses Thesis? So i guess we will know when Matt moves over to Blogger?

I am not sure why people actually think that site content is the only or maybe even the primary SEO attribute.

We all know that many factors other than content affect a sites ranking, so i have no idea why anyone would think that "the platform" is totally out of bounds or would never be considered.

Since the first of the year, i have been testing a theory that google is indeed using factors similar to this in its rankings. I do have some statistically relevant data to show that using certain ESP's (email service providers) may actually impacts rankings.

I am not, nor have i ever been in the IM niche. But over many years, i have watched the IM niche ruin many good things.

I rely on ESP's for my business, and I do have some reason to believe (statistics) that letting google see you are using certain ESP's does have affects on SEO.

I am no where near ready to come out and make "the death of XXX esp" report...(i will let ryan deiss do that...lol). But you are crazy if you think google is not watching stuff like this..

YES!! Finally some sense, and from the UK too

I seemed to recall hearing something like that about Blogger.com sites just before tens of thousands of them got whacked. And Hub Pages and many Article Directories and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Oh, and MFA sites by the hundreds of thousands...

While it may sound retarded to you, given the history of how Google has reacted to virtually every system IM'ers have used over the years, I think it makes good business sense to stop and consider the possibility.

As WP sites become associated with spam sites more and more, it's inevitable that Google will do something, especially as IM becomes saturated with them.

Actually, a lot of marketers using shared hosting on HG and other hosts have gotten slapped over the years.

But the moment it leaves the server, it becomes static - just pure HTML. For all intents and purposes, the page cannot be changed at that point, so it's no longer dynamic.

Just semantics perhaps, but it's the script that's dynamic, not the HTML. HTTP is stateless with no persistence, so a served page can't be dynamic by protocol.

Yes, we can talk about JavaScript and AJAX, but that presupposes that it's enabled and even then, most bots don't run JS when parsing the page.

And that is what I see as exactly the real concern. In and of itself, WordPress isn't a problem.

The real problem is the way IM'ers focus on exploiting everything they can for traffic/profit that invariably causes problems. These are the types of things Google focuses on.

WP is clearly the most common platform used (and abused) in IM, so I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that Google might eventually begin flagging WP sites for additional scrutiny. Every plugin or theme that's essentially built to game SERP's is going to get flagged sooner or later - I'll bet a six-pack of coke on that.

For me at least, this is really the crux of the issue - developing a sustainable authority site that's going to be viable 10 years down the road.

Honestly, how many of those today are built on WP?

Using it to slap together an affiliate site or membership is fine - those don't need the flexibility or the control that only an original solution can provide.

Personally, I don't have anything against WordPress as a platform, other than some developer frustration with its limitations. But it's also not a platform I'd ever recommend for the purpose of a stable, long-term authority site.

While this thread has exploded with arguments on either side of the OP, if it's gotten anyone to really stop and think about it, then I'd say it's served it's purpose.

I really hope you're being sarcastic.
Hard to tell.

your sites ip address does already affect seo. so if you are on shared hosting with HG or any other host, then your seo is already affected by others on the same ip to a small degree at this point.

Also sharing the same ip or even class C ip with "bad neighbors" also has negative seo affects.

Your sites loading speed affects seo, which can be affected by lots of things related to your hosting or data center.

blogger.com was also hit by some of the algo changes in the past.

there are several things dealing with images that do have some affect on seo currently.

there are some javascripts that will have negative affects on your seo.

SEO algorithms are crazy advanced. They include all sorts of stuff.

Shared hosting can get you penalized, depending on the other "tenants".

But I say you get penalized for using Windows anyway, so....

Great post. You really illustrated the flaw with the argument against WP.

You obviously didn't read the entire thread - at no time did I ever say or suggest that WP would be gone.

But then again, maybe you are right about the crap that comes out of some people's mouths :rolleyes:

Forgive me Floyd, I may have missed something but this is about Wordpress, which Google doesn't own, not Blogger.

I'm not sure you can make a blanket statement like "all WP business sites look unprofessional." With proper planning and execution, WP can be used as the engine driving very professional-looking business sites. Do it right, and only an expert inspecting a page or post's source code can tell WP is the CMS.

With that said, I will stipulate that WP makes it very easy to create sites that look unprofessional or worse. Look at all the threads just in the forum asking about "free [niche or market] themes." They grab the same theme as hundreds or thousands of other sites in the same niche based on pretty pictures, without realizing that many of these are either shoddy or even infected with stuff they don't want.

I'll also stipulate that too many people try to force WP into doing things it was never intended to do. Take the humble squeeze page, for example. Why would anyone go through the bother of setting up a database and CMS for a one or two page site? Seems like that would be like trying to enter a Clydesdale in the Kentucky Derby.

But I can't agree with the blanket statement that using WP for a business site is unprofessional.

Sorry Floyd.

Reading what you originally wrote again I can see what you said. I didn't read that as you wrote it I'm afraid.

I stand corrected .

I think some people here are over estimating the impact that small time IMers and their content have on the larger online ecosystem.

I have only recently started to look at IM again seriously after a break of a few years. Outside places like WF no one cares what you are doing or thinks about IM. They might use the services offered by IMers but they are not thinking of you as an industry anymore than they ponder the visual merchandising industry when they go to buy some cereal. We are a tiny drop in a very large ocean filled with all types of content delivered by all kinds of platforms.

Sure some IMers are a pain in the ass for search engines, but they are not going to punish all users of a particular CMS (54% of websites running on a CMS are WP) we are not that important! Imagine the party Microsoft would have if Google slapped a huge chunk of the online environment and suddenly there was a reason to use Bing!

If you are really worried about Google penalties then ask yourself why? If you have good content, a well built site and are not using unethical or unnatural looking ranking practices you should be right. (If you have picked a popular niche you might not get to page one, but life is tough sometimes)

If your content is copied and pasted content with a bit of spin and some extra keywords stuffed in, your site is hard to navigate and full of broken links or your idea of SEO is linkfarms, blog spamming or link blasting software, then clean up your act and sleep easier.