Which is the most SEO friendly CMS?

[abirami]

Which the most SEO Friendly and User friendly CMS?

[ergophobe]

Honestly, I forget the name, but there was talk recently of a CMS that debuted at the SMX Conference that is built for SEO from the ground up, but it is quite expensive from what I heard.

What's your budget?

[choster]

As with any "what's the best" topic, the answer is "it depends"— it depends on your SEO goals, your budget, your environment, and so on.

I will plug for Drupal, however, as a package that comes with "clean urls" (i.e. no CGI strings) out of the box, and has well-maintained open source modules for configurable automatic URL renaming, URL redirection (e.g. accounting for 301 vs 302 redirection), robots.txt control (even in multi-site installations), and XML sitemaps.

[BradleyT]

Don't forget nodewords (meta tags) for Drupal for custom page title and meta description.

About the only thing I've found difficult in Drupal for SEO is trying to nofollow some internal links that appear in the navigation menu.

[ergophobe]

The thing that I find troublesome about drupal (which is my preferred platofrm) is all the cruft in the CSS and HTML. As you add modules, that stuff starts accumulating until your get either very many or one huge CSS file.

I think that both in terms of load times and just extraneous information is sub-optimal. With effort, you can get rid of this, but it's work.

I'm talking about stuff where you get things like
<div id="views-view-my-view-block_1" class="block block-block-1 block-views-block delta-3">

If you start adding in Views, CCK, and other modules like that, it starts to get a little crazy. The idea is to provide classes and ideas for every conceivable theming situation, so you get some a lot of cruft.

I don't know how this stacks up against a highly customized install of Joomla or others, but I do think that's the major downside of drupal.

[motwguy]

I am very happy with a Joomla and sh404sef combination.

[ergophobe]

I am very happy with a Joomla and sh404sef combination.

Why?

The thing I was trying to drive at was... what does it mean to be SEO friendly?

- navigation?
- url structure?
- content first page structure?
- lightweight pages?
- low server load (which will affect load times)?
- etc etc etc?

Sure, CMS X32 has clean URLs, any navigation structure you want, keywords in URLs and you can use a content-first theme. Does this make it SEO friendly?

You can add meta description and keywords. Does this make it SEO friendly?

You can have different H1 and <title> tags. Does this make it SEO friendly?

All of those things are true for Drupal, for example, which I agree is pretty SEO friendly.

To me, all the open source CMS ultimately try to be all things to all people, and that alone is going to bring a slight disadvantage in terms of code bloat and slow load times.

[mergen]

i'm surprised no one mentioned wordpress. isn't wordpress THE MOST SEO friendly CMS out there? it has that ping feature, and it comes nearly ready to go from the get go. the best thing is... after installation of a few plugins, my blog posts were already appearing in search results within hours.

i have used joomla quite extensively; it can be a pain to make it completely seo friendly... especially if you are dealing with some of the third party dynamic modules.

haven't done much drupal

[tangor]

Answer: none.

SEO is a state of mind, not software. Decisions and choices of presentation, not application code. Language bits elevated to the absurd. Any CMS can be abused the same way. Pick the one that's easiest to learn. :)

There's no magic bullet. If there was I'd have found it between 1996 and now. I've been looking REALLY hard!

[T_Miller]

Agreed. No magic bullet CMS for SEO.
The actual Content is still king, as it should be.

I see plenty of poorly built & designed sites (usually by niche enthusiast/hobbyist) with zero SEO efforts that rank quite well simply because their information (the content) is superior to all the MFA sites in the niche.

[Thenatos]

Take a look at Modx. It gets totally out of the way and you control 100% of all the presentation of HTML/XHTML. Since you control all the presentation you can implement menus, categories, sections, titles, anything any way you see fit. Focus on the 0.9.3 release for now. The revolution 2.0 version is a complete framework for web app dev in beta and a core rewrite.

[ergophobe]

SEO is a state of mind, not software.

This is sort of where I was trying to go by asking what people mean by SEO friendly. It's thrown around a lot, but what does it mean?

To me, it means that the CMS throws the minimum number of obstacles in front of you when doing your SEO efforts, but that a CMS can't in and of itself have "good SEO".

So in a sense, the question could be rephrased: what are common obstacles to decent SEO that are caused by CMS?

[phranque]

- url canonicalization
- duplicate content

[Ozymandias]

I don't think there is a 'best' CMS out of the box. I haven't seen one mainstream CMS that is optimized for SEO out of the box.

It all depends on the plugins and extensions created for them. WordPress has some fundamental SEO flaws out of the box, but plugins and extensions take care of those issues. Same with Drupal.

I will plug both WordPress (what I use) and Drupal (harder learning curve), and UNPLUG Joomla which is weak but bear in mind this was from about 2 years ago when I last used it.

Regards,
OZ

[ergophobe]

Joomla has some SEO plugins that I think can make it work quite well these days. All three of the ones you mention have progressed a lot in the last few years - not so long ago they were all abysmal (dupe content/URL canonicalization).

[Robert Charlton]

...CMS that debuted at the SMX Conference that is built for SEO from the ground up, but it is quite expensive from what I heard....

That particular CMS is PixelSilk, and it's discussed a bit in this Supporters thread....

SEO Friendly CMS
[webmasterworld.com...]

I was one of the posters impressed by my conversations with the PixelSilk people at SMX, but for various reasons have not yet followed up. If anyone has looked into PixelSilk, I'm curious how an expensive, enterprise level CMS compares with the better known open source packages discussed here... particular for large ecommerce applications.

I should mention, btw, that the following thread in this forum is definitely one worth checking...

A CMS alternative to Wordpress
[webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:20 am (utc) on June 28, 2009]

[martinibuster]

...i'm surprised no one mentioned wordpress. isn't wordpress THE MOST SEO friendly CMS out there?

More like WordPress is "THE MOST" hacker friendly CMS out there. ;)

[abirami]

Yes I too agree, Wordpress can be hacked easily if not secured properly