Most CMS’s Deliver Duplication

So what is the single biggest issue with the majority of CMS’s?
Without doubt duplication of information is the single most common factor with content management systems, when you consider that information duplication is probably at the top of most search engine 'hate lists' then it becomes obvious that 'there may be trouble ahead' if you go down the CMS path without a clear understanding of the system you are committing your net presence to.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN have waged a constant war on information duplication, it originated from clamping down of the many forms of spam abuse such as ‘mirror sites’ and ‘website cloning’. As the years went by the complex filtering and evaluation mechanisms became ever stricter in the drive to eliminate this abuse and in the process the drive towards devaluing any type of duplication came through a natural progression of the spam war.

This drive has continued to the present day but there are now other factors that are becoming more important. The sheer size of the infrastructure needed to house the billions of pages archived by search engines means there is a constant battle with efficiency and space. This has led to the introduction of very strict parameters that websites must work within to avoid penalties for duplication, stepping outside these parameters will put the website pages at risk of being dropped from active search results.

To understand how easy it is to break these parameters you need to learn how a search engine spider reads code and navigates a site, the areas of the page that have a bearing on information delivery to a spider are particularly important. This knowledge should be factored into CMS development and is as important as the user interface and the ease of use for administration.

CMS Development Lacks Understanding of SEO Principles

Sadly in the world of CMS development there is a clear lack of understanding of the dimension that is so important to a websites success, it matters not how good the site looks and navigates if it gets purged from active search results then it was a poor investment. It is well documented that the perfect blend is a well designed site that has good natural search positions and where PPC can be used tactically as part of an overall strategy rather than the sole provider of search traffic.

The systems we looked at all fail to deliver on the search engine friendly front and yet some are sold with this as a leading benefit of the system. There is no excuse in today’s market for this type of failure, there is some top quality expertise that is available for CMS development companies to harness, my guess is that there is still a general apathy from these developers where search engine functionality is concerned.