How does using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress/Drupal) affect backlinks and SEO?

[JaredMumford]

"So I'm just wondering, since CMS pages are pretty much created on spot and not retrieved from a library, how this affects backlinks and anchor text? How exactly does the external website point to yours if the URL is dynamically generated?"

Firstly, different CMS's create pages differently. CMS just means content management, which means the platform just provides a gui for you to add content or make changes. If you are using WP and creating pages, then these pages wil be indexed as any other page, and links pointing to it would simply target the page's URL.

Wordpress uses permalinks and Drupal uses pathauto to redirect platform generated links into SEO friendly one. They use an internal redirect and the resulting URL is indexed in Google. Therefore, you simply treat the resulting URL as the "real" url, and external links to it work fine.

[seochump]

Ahhh, so Google indexes URLs and not the pages themselves? D'oh.

[CMC-SD]

I think you are misunderstanding something, yes.

On a website with a CMS, the URL is not "dynamically generated." The page is dynamically generated. Here's what that means. Whenever you type http://www.domain.com/page1.html into your browser, you are telling your browser to go to that website and pull up the HTML that corresponds to that URL.  URL stands for "uniform resource locator," meaning directions to the location of a resource. If you have an old-fashioned website, the URL points to an HTML file that you created, either by typing everything yourself of using a WYSIWYG editor. If you have a CMS, the URL essentially instructs your website to build the corresponding HTML page on the fly.

It's like ... okay, imagine that you walk into a bakery and ask for a chocolate chip cookie. They could either pull a pre-baked chocolate chip cookie off the shelf and hand it to you, or walk in the back and bake you one cookie from the ingredients in the kitchen. When we're talking about baked goods, option 1 is almost always better than option 2 because it's orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. The benefits that option 2 offers aren't worth the extra time and lost efficiency. But when we're talking about websites, that's no longer the case. The server can construct an HTML document almost instantaneously. Your browser gets the HTML just as fast as it would if it asked for a static HTML page.

In fact, your browser really has no idea that this is all happening. Here's another food metaphor. You walk into a fast food joint and order a hamburger. The cashier walks into the kitchen, and a minute later, walks out with your hamburger. Did the cashier pull the hamburger off a shelf of hamburgers that have been sitting under a hotlight for hours? Or did the cashier ask the cook to prepare a fresh hamburger just for you? Assuming the hamburger tastes great either way, you have no way of knowing. In this metaphor, the customer is the surfer, the cashier is the browser, and the kitchen is the server your website is hosted on. Either your server has a bunch of pre-made pages sitting around waiting for someone to "order" them, or your server has a clever program that makes the pages only when they're needed. That clever program, the CMS, is like the short-order cook.

The thing to remember is, the search engine spiders are customers, just like the surfer. They don't know what's going on in the kitchen. They don't care. They "typed in" a URL and got some HTML back. They now know that that URL produces that HTML. They remember that. When they see a link to that URL, they know it's pointing to that HTML.

Clear as mud?

[CMC-SD]

No. What "indexing" means is creating a database of URLs and the HTML that those URLs point to. If your site has been "indexed," it means Google has discovered your URLs and taken note of the HTML that can be found at those URLs.

[JaredMumford]

This is probably the most well constructed, and humorous explanation on this that I have ever read. Bravo.

[CMC-SD]

Thanks! That's what happens when a creative writing major learns php.

[seochump]

@CMS-SD: Great metaphor! I'm going to steal it But I already knew that about CMS's xD.  In fact my confusion was about what follows from that... If the pages are created dynamically and not retrieved from the webserver itself, how do would a backlink even REFER it??

I actually found this SEO blog touching on the subject matter: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

So, pretty much this is how it works: A page is linked through the URL that is randomly generated by a CMS, but the webserver rewrites the URL that points to the original URL. Pretty much the same thing. And google indexes that URL plus the html on the page. Is that about right? That is why I should not worry at all.

[CMC-SD]

Oh, okay, I definitely misunderstood. You're asking about the back-end rewriting process that makes a pretty URL point to the corresponding ugly URL which in turn points to the page. That's way back-end. Unlike a 301 redirect, it's invisible to the spider. The spider need never know that a URL like http://www.domain.com/?p=123 even exists. While it's crawling, it sees a link to http://www.domain.com/page1.html, follows the link, and sees the HTML for that page. That's all.

[danatanseo]

Ditto to that Jared. Great explanation. And now I'm hungry.

[seochump]

Thank you very much CMC-SD, Jared and goodlegaladvice for all your help.

@CMC-SD: As promised, I stole your analogy (Now I realize it was an analogy and not a metaphor, I think) and I tried to explain CMS to my girlfriend who knows nothing about computers. Unfortunately it did not come out as elegantly as you put it and we ended up eating bison burgers instead.

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, saw the follow-up, but I think the overall thread has you covered. The only real issue with CMS URLs is that you can sometimes have multiple versions pointing to the same page, and this creates duplicate content. There are plug-ins for WordPress that can help with that.

The only exception would be something like an AJAX-style URL, where the page content could change without the URL ever changing (Flash has the same issue, for example). You'll rarely see that in a standard CMS, though, and definitely not in WordPress.