Forum Moderators: phranque
I don’t know if it’s just me, but whenever I search for anything in google, I honestly can’t recall a CMS site matching my search query in any way. Coincidence or just CMS sites are not cutting it in search engine world?
I’m thinking of having a CMS site but this outcome worries me.
Do you think I’m wrong or is there some truth in my theory, I hope I’m wrong because I want a CMS site.
Please let me know what you think and if there’s any truth in it regular sites being better at being picked up in search engines than CMS.
I don't know, do a little test and see if a CMS site matches whatever search you were after and comes up in top 10.
[edited by: Member02 at 12:53 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2006]
The only difference is how well the CMS is configured/setup and how well it builds pages.
You can tailor any CMS to produce pages in the same way that you'd build them by hand.
With the open-source CMS's (all of them) it takes a little work to get that right. Many of them have minimal flexibility when it comes to page titles, meta-descriptions etc. Most of them you need to mod_rewrite to get clean URL's. These things generally need tailoring.
I don't know, do a little test and see if a CMS site matches whatever search you were after and comes up in top 10.
Pick any big highly ranked site from the BBC to Wikipedia and it'll have a CMS behind it. Actually Wikipedia is a good example. That's a type of CMS. Show me a SERP that doesn't have a Wikipedia article in it somewhere ;)
Please let me know what you think and if there’s any truth in it regular sites being better at being picked up in search engines than CMS
I know of many CMS sites that rank badly due to the bad way in which the CMS has been configured. There's one site I can think of, for example, that has some 3,000 pages of good quality content, but all the page titles on every page are the same - the site name. It has other basic mistakes along similar lines. That's why it doesn't rank as well as it should. That's simply a configuration issue that the webmaster hasn't worked out yet.
If you don't know how to get the best of a CMS, often involving recoding it, then yes, you'd probably get better results building by hand. That said, CMS systems are getting better at this.
Why not download a CMS - pick a reasonably well respected one like Mambo, chuck some content in there and see what the resulting page source looks like. If you're not happy with it, try and tweak it.
TJ
