CMS Survey

search engine friendliness

Survey Of Search Engine Friendly CMS

In a survey of fifteen high budget CMS platforms none were found to be truly SEO friendly, all are sold on a promise of SEO functionality and in the worst cases they would send a website into search oblivion within weeks.

Of these fifteen eight were proprietary systems and seven were bespoke systems, in the worst cases there was no functionality for individual and unique meta information, the internal pages had as many as seven different identities depending on which way you navigated the site and huge sections of hostile code headed up each individual page. To compound these issues repetitive information auto generated through each page in crucial areas. 

All of this is more than enough to get the site into serious problems in natural search, to prove this we researched the internet to find sites using these systems sure enough they were languishing in Google’s omitted results category.

Poor System Drawbacks

The problem with the worst of these systems is that they could not easily be made search engine friendly. The proprietary systems would need the central core improved which would in turn affect the modules of all of the clients of the CMS development company. The bespoke systems would require many man days of improvement and subsequently significant extra cost to the client.

Even the better systems still lack significant SEO functionality, this missing 30% will still render the websites using them uncompetitive in most areas of natural search and that is providing the client can maximise the potential of this limited functionality. In most cases the website owners lose a further percentage and the result is further erosion of the competitive edge and more duplication of