Have you ranked better with wordpress or a normal site

[mrjibbles]

Hi All

my site uses Wordpress and doing ok, but im just wondering if anyone has experience of a Wordpress site compared to a normal html and how they found they ranked?

As the pages interlink with each other, do you see this as a good or not?

Rob

[WiganWebs]

Hi,

I have had mixed results with a wordpress blog compared to a normal html website. Getting links from high quality blog directories used to do it for me, but over the last month I have heard rumours that G is thwarting the relevancy of blog links. If thats true or not is pure myth, as is Google. Personally, I dont know if to believe them or not.

One of my blogs was getting 400 UV per day and I was making very little cash from it, including from adsense, I seem to have a better ROI on holding pages pointing my affiliate deep-link to the merchants landing page. I think it has to do with people thinking as blogs as what they are, they are there for information and they visit blogs for a good discussion or an opinionated review, not always to buy, so the conversion rates will be slightly down. However, the interest in the product is still there so it may only be a slight decrease.

Through my blog my biggest earner was clickbank, I had little or no PR which for some reason people still deem relevant when buying or exchanging links, so my income on that perspective was very little. The only relevancy I see PR playing a part is it shows that the site has been indexed in Google SERP's for more than 2-3 months which could play a part towards inbound link relevancy.

Plus, getting linked into blog directories usually requires at least 2-3 months posting, then if the content of the blog is above average then you will get natural inbound links from interested parties.

As stated, I have since moved my interest to 1-2 page landing pages with a generic keyword domain and have seen good results when ranked in G. 1 landing site can get 20-30 UV per day, 10 can get 200-300, etc, etc. If you do come across a good domain you may see better results, hence it could also work the other way, thats the gamble.

Also it requires (as always) your landing page has to be built of a good structure, links and banners high up where they can be seen, a good review and plenty of content.

This is my view as wordpress vs html. I can tell you that the structure of wordpress is SEO friendly, probably one of the best I have used.

One last point, I used to have a very high ranking ink cartridge website (made with pure html) that had some fantastic results, this was in 2005. I was basically carrying all of my eggs in one basket. Then my site crashed and burned due to a silly experiment that G was doing, a so-called disatrous G update. If you have 10 sites and 1 crashes then you have 9 others to fall back on at least, thats what I learned the hard way.

Just a few words from my experiences, I hope they are useful

Terry

[mrjibbles]

Cheers Terry

A long reply! Thankyou for taking the time to write it.

Ive only got the 1 site at the moment while i learn it all and see what i find works and what doesnt but its doing ok but curiosity is always a good thing in my eyes. Web 2.0 seems to be the in thing, but im wondering if its all a short lived thing, and normal websites will end up rulling in the end once web 2.0 has had its day..

Anyway, cheers again for your views... interesting to read

Rob

[foxtucker]

One last point, I used to have a very high ranking ink cartridge website (made with pure html) that had some fantastic results, this was in 2005. I was basically carrying all of my eggs in one basket. Then my site crashed and burned due to a silly experiment that G was doing, a so-called disatrous G update. If you have 10 sites and 1 crashes then you have 9 others to fall back on at least, thats what I learned the hard way.

Just a few words from my experiences, I hope they are useful

Terry

The 'crash' was unavoidable. It wasn't anything you did. In 2005 I was pulling £8000 (yep, £8000) a month in Google Adsense revenue, from one site. They simple made a significant change to the way they ranked sites. You and I were not alone .

I too have spread my revenue opportunities across a number of sites since that happened.

[tbp]

I prefer normal sites, but do have a couple of Wordpress sites.

The trouble is that to make sure a site is fully optimized for SEO, you need to know exactly how it works, which can be difficult when you use a 3rd party package like Wordpress.

The SEO isn't great with these packages when you first install them, you have to install a load of plugins to make them SEO optimised.

The main problem is that the same content can be displayed through a number of different url's, eg the post on its own, on a category page, on an archive page, with a url id or with a friendly seo name. You need to setup a robotx.txt file to block these.

Also plugins to let you put custom titles and meta tags in are well worth installing. There are number of other plugins which help out, but the above is the minimum.