A site review please
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you have done agood job in visiuals and layout, but as i said using a CMS is not good for SEO. There is a trade off.
What i would suggest is creating your landing pages by hand, making them perfect, use a CMS for pages where ranking is not crucial. There you get the best of both worlds.
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Alan, it is great you are generous with your time and offer your assistance to others. In your course of doing so, you are "selling" some very unpopular ideas which lacks reputable support.
We all have our own experiences and knowledge to share from. I often have opinions on topics which I am reluctant to share because frankly I lack substantiating evidence. If I do share such beliefs I clearly indicate they are my beliefs and not necessarily accepted by the SEO community. I would suggest you may wish to do the same, especially in this regard.
I made the statement Wordpress is OUTSTANDING for SEO. It is a correct and accurate statement, and it is supported by industry experts and results! I went to the effort and obtained relevant and exact quotes from someone you have quoted repeatedly in an effort to support those statements, and you simply disregard them. Now you claim Matt Cutts is biased? Do you sincerely believe Matt would have made any of those statements if he did not 100% believe them to be true? Matt seems like a role model for credibility.
I suggest caution. You are sharing inaccurate statements. You are a .NET programmer and seem to have an extreme bias towards everything Microsoft related. You have numerous responses where you praise .NET and bash competitors. You praise Bing and bash Google. By doing such you risk losing credibility with a lot of good people.
I should add when I perform a search in Google.com for "website valdiation" there are 10 very relevant results returned. When I perform a similar search for "website violation", not one of the top 10 results is relevant to Bing violations. This indicates you are using a very unpopular term which you, as a .NET specialist might be aware of, but the rest of the world isn't.
A final note. I have no problem with this conversation and I hope you do not either. If everyone agrees then the world quickly becomes a boring place. I learn a lot more from passionate discussions of opposing viewpoints then I do with the many "I agree" discussions. I hope you feel the same way.
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Can you locate a single article by Google, SEOmoz or a reputable SEO who does not have a significant personal interest at stake (i.e. represent a competing platform) which supports the idea "using a CMS is not good for SEO". You are seriously the first and only person I have ever heard make this claim and I tried to locate supporting evidence for it but have failed to find any.
The view you are sharing is unsupported. If you have any evidence to share to the contrary, I would love to see it. I consider myself a student of SEO. There is always something to learn. I would love to learn how this concept can be supported with logic.
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I suggested that not including a source to your quote, something to suggest others do, not including a qualifying comment or the context the quotes were made in is bias.
I see in this post much the same time as your comments in this thread, you suggest that the CMS user gets a programmer to fix the errors. “Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:” http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-split-urls-i-don-t-know-what-to-call-this-but-it-s-seriously-messing-up-my-google-analytics-reportsPS I have no problem debating with you ryan.
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I dont judge things on what others are saying. i refere you to my precvious comment
"I will make my conclusions from the code written by WP amd the violations found by Bing, keep it factual."
No amount of cut and paste comments from the internet will change that.
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I normally offer the source for quotes, but then again the source is normally in writing or a short video. In this instance, the video is 46 minutes in length. Most of the quotes I shared are in the first few minutes: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/
I see in this post much the same time as your comments in this thread, you suggest that the CMS user gets a programmer to fix the errors. “Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:”
My response had nothing to do with a CMS, but rather a website which is experiencing a URL redirection problem. If any user has a problem with a trailing slash be added, or not being added, to URLs then a fix such as an .htaccess regex expression can be offered to resolve the problem (in a LAMP environment).
The root issue I think is WordPress has made it very easy for novices and those without programming experience to build a website. Many such site owners are completely lost and make tons of errors. They often encounter issues because they are over their head, and then they ask for help. It's a bad stretch to say because some people don't understand or misuse the software that the software is bad. Just today I was asked to evaluate a .NET site and it is poorly designed on multiple levels. Right off the bat the site has 70+ validation errors on the home page. It has plenty of issues which you refer to as violations as well. I would not state .NET is bad for SEO because this particular .NET site is poorly designed for SEO.
PS. Thanks for the friendly debate.
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Below is a link to a relatively clean install of WordPress. A theme and test content has been added. Could you help educate me and share what violations you find?
As a note, this site is close to 2 years old, and was likely a set up and forget it type of thing. There are some user comments which may have invalid external links, but that is not the fault of the site design. Also, the page should be evaluated in more of a standalone context as other pages just offer dummy data so you will experience duplicate content and such issues which are not relevant. The focus is the software architecture offered by WP.
http://www.ndesign-studio.com/demo/wordpress/blog/how-about-a-blog-post-with-longer-title
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I will say that ASP.NET is bad for SEO. ASP.MVC on the other had was designed to take care of the SEO problems that ASP.NET had. Namely viewstate. The nature of ASP.NET was using user controls that are a bit CMS like, they way that it spits out HTML on your behalf. where MVC allows you get closer to the metal and have full control over how the HTML is rendered.
i have stated many times that I have never used WP, but i have investigated many other CMS systems, and all i have found spit out SEO unfriendly code. I settled on Orchard CMS, and wrote abort it being the best for SEO prematurely as after using it more I found it also has many SEO problems and not from misuse. I have been able to negate any of these problems, fixing them outside of the CMS UI itself.I will also say that I have seem one example of WP use that was close to perfect, I congratulated the owner for it, it was not perfect but close, I assume he did the same fixed problems outside of the CMS UI.
If I owned a site where I needed many users to write content on a daily basis I would probably use a CMS depending on budget and such, but I would accept the problems and fix them them somehow.
As for examples of others having the same SEO concerns with CMS’s, a quick search found many examples.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/choosing-the-right-cms-platform-for-your-website-from-an-seo-perspective
http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume95/seo-friendly-web-development.htm
http://www.seo.com/blog/lord-of-the-seo-friendly-cms/
http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/64352 -
All togther i found 6754 violations according to Bing.
Some of the more concerning
invalid markup 1394
Broken links 1654
unnecessary redirects 1218
Canonical issues 496
If that is the best you could find, then what can i say.
Ndesign Studio make plugin and thems for Wordpress I believe, yet this is teh result?
I use Visual studio, any markup erros would be detected in my error list, and would be fixed. Why has this developer allowed all these violations, Did WP allow then to go though undetected?
How do you get invalid markup, when WP created the markup?
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Gentlemen, please stay on the original thread about the site review for this particular site and back off a bit from the arguing. Thanks!
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Thanks for the feedback gents. Am working my way through the list of issues highlighted in this thread (bar the one about not using wordpress hehe). A lot of the html issues on my site were probably caused by myself. My html knowledge is less than good hence using wordpress and also frontpage 2003 to edit code.
Rest assured that my company's proper web design work is done by people who know what they are doing, likewise so the seo (my main area). I like to keep my hand in and potter about with site ideas every now and then, I normally make them myself because I do not know until they are running if they will return enough revenue to justify me using employees to work on them.
The focus of this site and another very similar, but more generic fashion based www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk is to try and combine an affiliate site with a community based site which is full of videos, articles, advice etc. From a web marketing point of view we know people do not want to buy a new dress each day, however it doesn't mean they are not interested in reading about dresses several times a week when bored at work. The USP of the fashion site generally is that a woman can shop all the UK's leading fashion sites at once rather than having to go to all of the sites listed here http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/retailers/ individually.
The key from an seo point of view of showing Google that the sites are more than just affiliate stores.
Oh, on a side note (and also funny but depressing at the same time) the moz crawl thought this of brighttights.com. Note, it only looked at 10,000 pages which is about 25% of the total.
Errors - 602
Notices - 24,973
One of the major issues I have is duplicate page titles. This is because of the category. Let's say there are 200 pairs of black tights. I have 33 on each page (11x3) and thus would have numerous pages. Because the category pages are dynamic I cannot rename them tights page1, tights page 2 etc so they all have the same name, Tight, despite having different urls.
I am not too fused about getting all 10 pages of the categories indexed so I may be worth telling google not to bother indexing them but still following the links on the pages and indexing the products themselves.
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These are the problems you get when using a CMS.
By the way i was not saying not to use a CMS, rather thet there are trade offs in doing so.
another reason I dont like to use them aside from SEO, is that if the client at the last moment asks for somthing outside of its capabilities, they can be hard to modify.
good luck
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Very true. That said, CMS has benefits for web designs. Many times we have built wordpress and joomla websites for clients using an off the shelf template (telling them we we doing so). For your small local business who want a website they can update themselves without having to to employ a designer they are great. Also a great cost effective solution for clients if they are happy to use an off the shelf template
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I am using CMS for almost hundred of sites we have developed. Besides few static sites.
We never faced any issue with SEO.
many of our sites are ranking good.
For Example: www.wisnetsol.com is Joomla based. And its ranking in top-10 for "Logo Design Dubai', Web Deisgn Dubai", and "SEO Dubai".
Looks like your answer is based on assumptions, that CMS generate some bad code or make it tough for SEO.
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I dont think you read my comments correctly.
I never said you can not ranik with CMS only that they spit out violations, obvioulsy you would do better without them.
for example
your site has over 18,000 violations according to Bing
over 5,000 broken links
over 4,000 html errors over 800 unessasary redirects leaking link juice
800 cases of long querry strings
over 200 canonical issues
I will have to say that your answer is based on assumptions that joomla was good for SEO
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