Wordpress Pages vs. Posts

[drewhammond]

When building a blog to promote a particular affiliate offer, I usually like to use a static "page" homepage and then have my posts displayed on another part of my site. I've noticed that my wordpress pages almost always rank higher than wordpress posts and I can't explain it...

Here are some possibilities I've thought of:

• XML Sitemap priority is set at 60% for pages and only 20% for posts
• My main navbar lists the pages which consequently means they get linked to on every page on my website.
• Some other phenomenon within the wordpress framework...

If it helps, I use Thesis v1.8 on all my sites.

I guess my ultimate question is: If pages do in fact rank higher than posts, is it worth it for me to go back and change the site structure on all my blogs which are using posts instead of pages. I know making major modifications like that can be disasterous but will it ultimately pay off?

Thanks

[Guest]

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[Luke22]

In my opinion there is no difference. Why you have this situation?... Consider things like:

1. How old is the page, links pointing to page (posts), maybe you have more links pointing there? And site structure. Often posts are accesible from your homepage or from categories, however each page you have (like About Us, etc.) like you mentioned is linked from every single document on your blog, posts are not...

You could change your each post to page and have them listed same way but it's not the point....

2. Consider creating special pages, where you can manually asign and lists more important posts... so each of that page will be optimized for keywords you want and contain posts about the same topic... however do not create to many of them and yes... they would be similar to "category" pages, but you would have more control inside.

Oh, had to edit cause forgot to actually answer, I wouldn't change posts to pages... as in fact there are just the same, just because of the side structure may seems different.

[AlanMosley]

It would seem its your linking that os the problem, ppages linked from every page are going to rank better. You should look into link sculpting and decide on a linking statagy for your site

[Dan-Petrovic]

I would imagine it's your linking structure and internal anchor text that affect it. As far as WP goes pages vs posts should not mean anything to Google as you can completely tweak the URL structure...etc to the point where it cannot figure out what's what. Have you tried implementing an auto-parse internal link tool? It gives great control over how pages are interlinked.

[mattotoole]

All good advice.  No difference between pages and posts.  It's all about how they're linked to.

For #1, if your pages are linked to in the nav bar, from every page on your site, that would explain them ranking higher than posts that aren't as well linked-to.

If you're relying on category links, your posts will be 3 levels down, at http://yoursite/category/yourcategory/yourpost.  You can improve this with a plugin or some code to strip out the /category base, to get http://yoursite/yourcategory/yourpost -- but that's still 2 levels down.  Best to link directly to important posts -- from the home page, or a well-targeted page, as in #2.

Thesis has a sidebar widget to show the latest posts from a category.  These are direct links.  If the widget doesn't fit your design, you can do it with a line or two of PHP.

If you want to link from a targeted page, as in #2, Thesis has a field to add text/html to a category page, turning it into a regular page with a list of posts.  But you'll still have that pesky /category base, unless you strip it out with a plugin or some code.

You can also add posts or a category page directly to the Thesis nav bar, which lets you link to whatever you want.

Unless there's a compelling reason not to, always set your Wordpress permalink structure to just %postname%