 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.
March Update|
| Top Ten Rankings in Google.com | 5 | 3 | 5 | | Top Ten Rankings in Yahoo.com | 0 | 0 | 6 | | Top Ten Rankings in MSN.com | 0 | 2 | 5 | | Top Ten Rankings in Google.in | 6 | 7 | 8 | | Top Ten Rankings in Yahoo.in | 0 | 2 | 5 | | Visitors from Search Engines | 107 | 220 | 210 | | Overall WebCEO Score | 165 | 215 | 229 |
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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Comments
Maybe this time we can optimize each one as much as possible.
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!
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.
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/joomla-seo/2519-joomla-versus-straight-html-search-engine-optimization.html
Steve
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