Specific Google search routine for Joomla and Drupal?

[edgarlomax]

Does Google have a specific mode for searching CMS based sites like Joomla and Drupal or are they treated as any other site?

[tedster]

This much I know - Google does have special test routines that they run against sites with common footprints. For instance, Googlebot will test for "soft 404" handling, and various other common IIS issues.

Google also tests dynamic URLs to see how variants and even nonsense requests are handled. Whether they have such routines defined specifically for Drupal or Joomla, I cannot say.

[kidder]

I think you could almost certainly say wordpress gets some special treatment. Not all of it positive.

[FranticFish]

Interesting Kidder - could you elaborate?

[edgarlomax]

It's odd as I've spoken with people who swear blind that Google has a special CMS mode and other people who think the whole idea is ridiculous.

In the absence of any actual information I'm moving towards the latter view myself.

[tedster]

To get some data on this, watch your server logs for googlebot queries. The kind of testing I described above is usually clear - and if there is a special "mode" for any given technology, then googlebot requests would make that obvious.

[darkyl]

I work with both Joomla and non Joomla sites extensively, and have never seen any differences in terms of seo results.

Based on my experienced they're not treated differently at all.

[tedster]

I'd agree that rankings are not going to be different, merely based on the platform. Spidering is more where I'd look for different treatment.

[kidder]

FranticFish - I think Google has it's own way of dealing with blogs in the search results, they have the blog search engine so that should tell you something. Wordpress blogs are a bit of a "tool of choice" for automation by spammers and in my opinion Google keeps blogs very much under control in the main organic SERPS. There are thousands of blogs out there for every possible niche you can think about but they don't fill all of the organic results. Of course this is just an opinion but I think blogs to a certain extent are rotated out of the results by design.

[FranticFish]

Food for thought, thanks.