Planing to move to Search Engine Friendly CMS

Need advices

[sezampicika]

So, as subject is saying.

I am soon planing to buy Interspire ArticleLive search friendly cms (good seo url's and html code) but first I need to hear your experiences.

curently my web has more than 150 pages and it is very hard for me to administrate all of them

I am not sure how will adsense and google search boots react on my site changes?

any help please?

[jetteroheller]

I wrote my own search engine friendly CMS. I started November 1997 with the project.

It was long time the base of my company delivering semainars to the advertising division of companies teaching them how to make their own web sites with my CMS.

Now this CMS is base to create all my online magazines. Much AdSense know how built in.

Since it's a high quality product, it's not for free.

[laertes]

sezampicika;

Why not do a search for "Powered by ArticleLive" and take a look at the Adsense ads showing on those sites? Should give you some idea. See if the ads seem to be targetted correctly to the theme of the sites/pages.

[sezampicika]

I will, thanks.

This is little offtopic..but how will normal google bot (for google search) react?

[malachite]

Sezampicika, why on earth would you spend more than $200 buying a CMS system when Joomla, IMHO a better system, is available completely free, with search engine friendly URL options available?

And if you set it up right, your .html URLs will be exactly the same as you've got now - Googlebots won't even know you've changed things. No loss of PR, no waiting to be re-indexed.

[sezampicika]

because I've tested ArticleLive... it has great capabilities.

I will look Joomla also!
thanks

[maxgoldie]

The tricky thing might be in moving a static html site to a CMS which generates dynamic pages. The big thing here also would be to ensure that PR isnt lost by using redirects.

[maxgoldie]

I know that Drupal and Mambo are able to create SE friendly URLs, and they are both free. Look for a site called opensourcecms, they have live demos there of some CMS platforms.

[icedowl]

sezampicika,

I understand the management problem that you are experiencing having been there myself. My first couple of years of dealing with it, I broke my site into about 14 sections that when uploaded worked seamlessly as one large site. I worked on adding content to each section as if it was a small site making management much easier.

Even by doing that I eventually reached a point where working on most of these smaller sections I started to feel the strain of site management. At that time I started looking around for a CMS solution just as you are doing. I settled on Mambo, after testing a few others out on a small insignificant site I have. This testing gave me a feel for which ones had the capability to do what I needed done, and at a reasonable rate of speed.

It was just over a year ago that I started making the switch to Mambo. While I was developing the Mambo version of my site I kept the html version running without making any updates to those pages. There were over 400 pages that I had to convert so it was quite an undertaking. The project took me about two months to complete, with the Mambo version going live last February. Since the switch to Mambo, that site has nearly doubled in size due to the ease of updating. It is a good move in my opinion. The built-in SEF works well with the spiders.

There is a drawback that I've run into --> I have about 5-6 of the old pages that I keep seeing in my logs as being entrance points. The SE's keep spidering them although they no longer exist, and no errors are generated as they now simply land on my home page. Since there are so few of these, I haven't bothered to take the time to address the problem as I have more productive things to do. I also see that most visitors are finding their way to the new versions of these pages. Your mileage may vary, and this might be an important issue to be aware of.

Eventually I plan to switch to Joomla. Before I make the switch, I will once again try the Mambo-to-Joomla procedure on a small, insignificant site. I don't relish the thought of running into unexpected problems and having downtime as a result. I want to know that the procedure runs as it should, and if there are problems, what to do about them.

[deepesh]

Here is my experience with different CMS:-

Joomla/Mambo - Heavy, Bloated, and not so search friendly but very very easy to use.

Drupal - SEO friendly, Good Block layout

but in terms of the best I would say:

TextPattern - SEO fiendly , light (whole package is only 285 Kb),outputs only XHTML 1.1 valid pages, very flexible

[moltar]

I just recently discovered that WordPress in fact is not just a blog software, but can easily be adopted and used as a CMS site. Robust templating and clean URLs - perfect combo! Plus there is tons of plugins and great API - you can roll your own.

[sezampicika]

thank you all guys... for help!

[gendude]

I've switched to WordPress as well - there are even plugins that allow you to set a static page as your homepage, if you need that kind of funcationality (i.e. you want a "launching pad" home page instead of a blog/news homepage).

There is a lot of Adsense knowledge revolving around WordPress as well - themes that are very Adsense friendly, plugins to allow you to automatically insert specific Adsense setups, etc.

Very light-weight, and easy to customize. I'm done with the "heavy" CMSes - give me WP.

[maxgoldie]

WordPress really improved with version 1.5.2 The "Pages" feature enable you to create static content with SE friendly URLs. There is also a plug-in for using WP as a CMS: Google for "Semiologic".

[martingale]

I have a CMS which is heavily modified to make it SEO friendly. The biggest thing in my mind is to make sure that your URLs are somehow generic, and not with any '.php' or anything like that in them.

Google might not care about the .php but if you ever decide to change your site to use different software, those CMS specific elements in the URLs will give you a massive headache.

On my site all the content lives under URLs that I could easily replicate statically if I wanted to, etc., and if I switched to a different CMS I would expect to be able to customize it to put up the same article at the same URL.

[irock]

Just wondering... I am developing a site around ezpublish which doesn't add ".html" to any URLs. So, it looks something like this: [domain.com...]

Do you think this is going to cause a problem? I run some tests which confirm the pages are all xHTML transitional.

Thanks for your help.

[martingale]

I think that should be OK. My site also does not have anything ending in '.html', just like yours, and it works fine. My concern was having it put '.php' in there or something, which would be a problem if I ever switched to a CMS not based on php.

[irock]

Nay... you can always tell your non-PHP server to parse your .php files as whatever language (ASP, JSP) you choose. This can be done by inserting a line into your .htaccess.