CMS's kill SEO?

[jbiggs77]

Is a CMS like PHPNuke or PostNuke going to kill your SEO? I have been thinking about switching a couple of sites over to one of these just to save myself some time and energy.

If these do really hurt your SEO, what are some alternatives that can make updates quicker and less painful?

[Kyle]

Most CMS's do not kill SEO. Having dynamic URLs is fine. It isn't so important to make your URLs extremely SEO friendly by using some rewrite script.

What you want to look out for are CMS's that use session variables in the URL. The same goes with forum software.

Pay attention to how many variables the given CMS passes through the URL. Also look at some established sites using the given CMS, and see how many pages they have indexed in Google.

[jbiggs77]

Based on that, what CMS would you recommend? I am already using PHPBB for the forums.

[Kyle]

I can't recommend any as I have never used any. But I've seen many in use and the sites were indexed fine.

You'll have to paste links to some you've discovered. I could look at them and recommend one for you.

[jbiggs77]

Here are a few:

Drupal (http://drupal.org)

Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com)

PHPNuke (http://www.phpnuke.org/)

PostNuke (http://www.postnuke.com)

I've heard good things from various people about all of these.

[Kyle]

Do you know how to check if these are search engine friendly on your own by using Google?

Doing things like allinurl:, and site specific searches?

[jbiggs77]

No I sure don't, if you could elaborate, I'll just go through and check them all out myself.

[Kyle]

So far it looks Drupal and Mambo are SE friendly.

What I do is type allinurl:www.whatever.com to see how many pages they have indexed. Sometimes you have to scroll to the bottom of the Google results and request more listings to see the data properly.

For example, with mambo... Set your Google results to 100.

Enter allinurl:mambo.mamboforge.net/demo/

Scroll to the bottom of the results and click on "repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Take a look at how many dynamic pages are indexed from that location. You know its SE friendly.

[jbiggs77]

Alright, thanks for the tip.

[Dan Morgan]

I use Mambo for my ski site and even have javascript launched PDF and print friendly pages indexed with the standard SEF urls.

You need to hack a little a little of the core to do a little more of the basic SEO but it is not too much hassle and there is plenty of advice of the forums.

[James]

If they don't come with friendly URLs then just use Apache's mod_rewrite.

[Emancipator]

you can write a content management system in 30minutes in php, and have it exactly how you like :) then it is also easy to expand on and add your own gizmos and features.

[jbiggs77]

I know a little bit of PHP but I'm not sure how I would even begin to go about writing a CMS. Are there any good how-to's out there to get me started?

[Chris]

I write all my own CMS's because quite frankly I've never seen a solution that did what I needed it to do. Being SE Friendly and SE Optimized are not the same thing.

[James]

Friendly is good, optimised and friendly are nice when put hand in hand, optimised but not friendly is basically a farce.

[AWS-Allen]

we use a http rewriter in our CMS product and boththe re-writer version and hte standard (no dynamic re-writers) all do great in the search engines.

it is written for asp.net 1.1 and SQL server. We have a standalone (you buy and host elsewhere) and we also offer it as a hosted solution.

www.gmpservices.com (http://www.gmpservices.com)
(click on software)