Joomla v. Wordpress v. Drupal

Written by Steve Burge

Drupal Logo Today we're building up to a little Search Engine Optimization competition we're going to be running over the next year.

We're curious to see how Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal stack up against each other in a fair SEO fight.

The Study:

Launch 3 sites: Amritsar.net.in (Drupal), Jabalpur.net.in (Wordpress) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla!)
Make them as similar as possible. Each site has 8 articles of 500 words. Each site has had some keyword and title optimization. Each city is of a similar size and has comparable Overture results.
Choose a relatively uncompetitive field (Indian cities) so that each domain has the potential for a big move in the search engine rankings.
Watch them carefully using Google Analytics and WebCEO, to track how well each one performs for its keywords.
After a year, see which solution has the best built-in SEO.

Why are you doing this? Because its fun, we're curious and the results may actually prove to be useful.

Reasons why this is a bad idea #1: Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 5.0 are coming out soon with substantially different architectures.

Solution: When they're launched we'll add two more sites, one using 1.5 and the other using 5.0. They'll be a little behind but we'll still enable us to track whether the new versions add any improvements in terms of SEO.

Reasons why this is a bad idea #2: You're going to wait a year to tell us the results!?!?

Solution: Obviously we'll have some results at the end of each month, but yes: have some patience.

Reasons why this is a bad idea #3: How can you guarantee each site will be equal?

Solution: We can't. We've just done our best. Send us any ideas at all about how we can make this race more fairer and more scientific.

Reasons why this is a bad idea #4: One only site for each? Isn't it possible that a freak event occuring to one site can skew the results.

Solution: Yes. But we'll be keeping an eye out for such events and anyone else who wants to run a similar test is very welcome to join up with us.

The three sites launch today. We'll keep you updated every month on how they're doing!

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Your Comments (3)

Compass

January 07, 2007

Great idea, but your control is not constent, its very probably that each city will have different competition so the SERP will be easier/harder.

Maybe a better idea is to have IDENTICAL content. Sure, they may get hit with a duplicate content penalty but it will be (probably) equally applied, so its still a valid test.

I would also use identical templates from a layout perspective. Shouldn't be too hard.

Oh yeah, can I help optimize the Joomla one smilies/wink.gif