March Update to Search Engine Optimization Test

As reported in earlier posts (launch post, first update and second update) we're running a test comparing the search engine optimization capabilites of Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress.  We created three sites, Jabalpur.net.in (Wordpress) Amritsar.net.in (Drupal) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla). Each website was created with a similar amount of content, similar Overture results and a similar domain name.

Within two weeks the Wordpress site was so far ahead that it looked as if they competition was over. Slowly however, Drupal and Joomla have recovered until they now lead the pack. The Joomla site now has 5 top ten rankings in every search engine that we're following and the Drupal site continues to climb, only in second place by a small amount.

OK, Cool...But what does this mean in the real world?

SEORefugee.com has a post discussing how irregular updates may be more damaging to your search engine ranking than never posting at all. By looking at Google's Patent Application, he summises that Google makes a decision about your site....

• Is it a blog? If so, we'll expect it to be updated regularly
• Is it a corporate website? If so, we can expect it to remain relatively unchanged

Basically, Google is asking you to decide what kind of site you want to be and then to walk the walk. If run a blog that used to be updated every day, but now hasn't seen fresh content two months, why should Google rank you? Why should searchers have to wade through months-old blog posts?

What is the one of the easiest ways Google can determine what kind of site you're running? Your software. If you install a Wordpress site you are telling Google that you're starting a blog and that it will be updated regularly. If you install Joomla or Drupal, Google has no such expectations. Maybe that is why Wordpress started so strongly, but has since fallen behind. If you don't meet expectations, you will be penalised.

Where next for our SEO tests?

We'd like to pick your brains. This time next month, we're going to launch another SEO test to run alongside this one.

Hopefully this new test will be bigger, better and more accurate. How should we do this? We're interested in testing the SEO capabilities of Open Source websites. How can we improve on this first small-scale test?

• Should we add an HTML site for comparison purposes (a control sample) ?
• Should we build sites focusing on a more competitive topic or less?
• Are there errors in this current test that we need to corrrect?

All opinions welcome....

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Your Comments (16)

Henriette

March 14, 2007

Use SEO friendly themes for the various program packages.

Steve Burge

March 14, 2007

That might be an idea. For this first test we tried to use the different packages completely out-of-the-box without hacks or real optimization.

Maybe this time we can optimize each one as much as possible.

Stuart

March 16, 2007

Great experiment! and very interesting results.

It begs the question: what if I have a corporate site with a blog? should I put them on seperate subdomains (blog.corporate.com and www.corporate.com) with wordpress running the blog and CMS running the corporate site?

The results suggest not- just have the whole site CMS- but I cant help wondering what would have happened if the wordpress site got regular postings.

Anyway my $0.02 worth is: dont start a different experiment, just dig deeper!

guido

March 16, 2007

Great work guys, but yuo forgot to specify any additional component/module you've used for Joomla(maybe OpenSEF?) and Drupal. I think it's important to know in comparison with the default configuration...

Steve Burge

March 16, 2007

Hi Stuart

I think you've given me a great idea for the next experiment. How about running the following three sites against each other...
1) wordpress.mydomain.com
2) mydomain.com/wordpress
3) mydomain (with CMS blog)

We'll update each one once per week and track the success of each.

Hi Teddy

We used all three out of the box, except for two things.... We made small modifications to the Wordpress .htaccess and adding Open-SEF to Joomla. We did this mainly so that the URLs would be the same on each site (page titles linked by dashes) but yes - if we were comparing 100% out of the box, Drupal would be doing even better.

Paul

March 31, 2007

Why not add a "control" site using HTML (e.g. Dreamweaver or equivelent) to see if the use of a CMS has an adverse effect on search engine rankings.

Steve Burge

March 31, 2007

Hi Paul

Thanks for the comment. We'd be thinking about something like that prior to launching another experiment in two weeks time.

Theres a really interesting discussion on the Open SEF forum about this: http://forum.j-prosolution.com...ation.html

Steve

Hong Kong internet marketing

April 09, 2007

Amazing, this is a really good blog! Ok the test is cool! What I like about is that you did it as it is a serious science experiment. That reminds me of my school life. I can't wait to see your next experiment!

shine

May 27, 2007

Quite Nice approach ! Great work .. Gud luck team for further enhancements.

bingo

May 28, 2007

You mention a new SEO test. Have I missed it, or hasn't there been anything lately? Also, is this SEO competition over? If not, an update coming soon?

Steve Burge

May 28, 2007

Hi Bingo

Yes - look for an update this week.

I have the next test all organized but I'm still waiting for the content to be written for the sites. If you know a quality, reliable copywriter I'd love to hear about them

themegarden.org

July 15, 2007

I don't think that this "experiment" can give some real evaluating of SEO capabilities of different cms products due to different content on those "test" web sites.

hound

August 07, 2007

Great experiement. My question is on Google wanting to know what kind of site you have and how often you update. If you offer good information, than you offer good information. And delivering information is the basis of their mission statement. If you have good information on a page (which is what is ranking, not the home page of your blog for people to wade through), why would it matter if your blog did not have a fresh post on it? Or was inconsistantly posted to? Why would that affect how good the information is on your page (good meaning good page titles, helpful links to other sites, well optimized copy, etc.). So, that's the only part I differ with.

John Bertrand

May 23, 2008

How's joomla compared the results with SEO?

jocuri

June 12, 2008

Keep up the good work! 10q

colon cleanse

August 26, 2009

great idea and the SEO test works fine and i am waiting for the nest update.