A site review please

[Grumpy_Carl]

Hi, first post here so hope i have posted this in the right place.

From reading the forums a number of people have asked for site reviews and received some very good feedback so I thought I would jump aboard too.

One of my companies, Digital Cow, is based around the world of affiliate marketing and had been doing very well until recent Google changes killed the whole process of making sites based around other people's datafeeds. Through considerable testing we have countered this by increasing the blend of duplicate content and unique, niche related, content. As a result a website we launched about 2 months ago is currently getting around 350 unique hits a day but seems to have stagnated. We know the potential is there for thousands of daily hits on this site and well over 20,000 hits a day on all our websites, but we are having issues with Google at the moment. One week we could be position 10 for a keyword, next position 90, then back to position 10 again and so on. In the last week some 95 keywords moved up the ranking and 62 moved down - we are seoing for a couple of hundred keywords.

A small sample of some of these words and our ranking for them are listed below

bodysuits women 13
tumbum 14
bright leggings 18
bright tights 18
bridal hold ups 19
opaque hold ups 20
girls in leggings 21
pretty polly hold up 21
fish net hold ups 22
slimming tights 22
tum bum 26
magic knickers 27
toeless tights 28

and there are many more.

The website in question is www.brighttights.com. If anyone could spare a moment to offer their opinion on what they think of the site re seo that would be most welcome. Given it's an ecommerce site there are limits to the content we can add on the homepage.

Many thanks

Carl

[AlanMosley]

I dont think you read my comments correctly.

I never said you can not ranik with CMS only that they spit out violations, obvioulsy you would do better without them.

for example

your site has over 18,000 violations according to Bing

over 5,000 broken links

over 4,000 html errors over 800 unessasary redirects leaking link juice

800 cases of long querry strings

over 200 canonical issues

I will have to say that your answer is based on assumptions that joomla was good for SEO

[Web-Designer-Dubai]

I am using CMS for almost hundred of sites we have developed. Besides few static sites.

We never faced any issue with SEO.

many of our sites are ranking good.

For Example: www.wisnetsol.com is Joomla based. And its ranking in top-10 for "Logo Design Dubai', Web Deisgn Dubai", and "SEO Dubai".

Looks like your answer is based on assumptions, that CMS generate some bad code or make it tough for SEO.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Very true. That said, CMS has benefits for web designs. Many times we have built wordpress and joomla websites for clients using an off the shelf template (telling them we we doing so). For your small local business who want a website they can update themselves without having to to employ a designer they are great. Also a great cost effective solution for clients if they are happy to use an off the shelf template

[AlanMosley]

These are the problems you get when using a CMS.

By the way i was not saying not to use a CMS, rather thet there are trade offs in doing so.

another reason I dont like to use them aside from SEO, is that if the client at the last moment asks for somthing outside of its capabilities, they can be hard to modify.

good luck

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks for the feedback gents. Am working my way through the list of issues highlighted in this thread (bar the one about not using wordpress hehe). A lot of the html issues on my site were probably caused by myself. My html knowledge is less than good hence using wordpress and also frontpage 2003 to edit code.

Rest assured that my company's proper web design work is done by people who know what they are doing, likewise so the seo (my main area). I like to keep my hand in and potter about with site ideas every now and then, I normally make them myself because I do not know until they are running if they will return enough revenue to justify me using employees to work on them.

The focus of this site and another very similar, but more generic fashion based www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk is to try and combine an affiliate site with a community based site which is full of videos, articles, advice etc. From a web marketing point of view we know people do not want to buy a new dress each day, however it doesn't mean they are not interested in reading about dresses several times a week when bored at work. The USP of the fashion site generally is that a woman can shop all the UK's leading fashion sites at once rather than having to go to all of the sites listed here http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/retailers/ individually.

The key from an seo point of view of showing Google that the sites are more than just affiliate stores.

Oh, on a side note (and also funny but depressing at the same time) the moz crawl thought this of brighttights.com. Note, it only looked at 10,000 pages which is about 25% of the total.

Errors - 602

Notices - 24,973

One of the major issues I have is duplicate page titles. This is because of the category. Let's say there are 200 pairs of black tights. I have 33 on each page (11x3) and thus would have numerous pages. Because the category pages are dynamic I cannot rename them tights page1, tights page 2 etc so they all have the same name, Tight, despite having different urls.

I am not too fused about getting all 10 pages of the categories indexed so I may be worth telling google not to bother indexing them but still following the links on the pages and indexing the products themselves.

[KeriMorgret]

Gentlemen, please stay on the original thread about the site review for this particular site and back off a bit from the arguing. Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

All togther i found 6754 violations according to Bing.

Some of the more concerning

invalid markup 1394

Broken links 1654

unnecessary redirects 1218

Canonical issues 496

If that is the best you could find, then what can i say.

Ndesign Studio make plugin and thems for Wordpress I believe, yet this is teh result?

I use Visual studio, any markup erros would be detected in my error list, and would be fixed. Why has this developer allowed all these violations, Did WP allow then to go though undetected?

How do you get invalid markup, when WP created the markup?

[AlanMosley]

I will say that ASP.NET is bad for SEO. ASP.MVC on the other had was designed to take care of the SEO problems that ASP.NET had. Namely viewstate. The nature of ASP.NET was using user controls that are a bit CMS like, they way that it spits out HTML on your behalf. where MVC allows you get closer to the metal and have full control over how the HTML is rendered.
i have stated many times that I have never used WP, but i have investigated many other CMS systems, and all i have found spit out SEO unfriendly code. I settled on Orchard CMS, and wrote abort it being the best for SEO prematurely as after using it more I found it also has many SEO problems and not from misuse. I have been able to negate any of these problems, fixing them outside of the CMS UI itself.

I will also say that I have seem one example of WP use that was close to perfect, I congratulated the owner for it, it was not perfect but close, I assume he did the same fixed problems outside of the CMS UI.
If I owned a site where I needed many users to write content on a daily basis I would probably use a CMS depending on budget and such, but I would  accept the problems and  fix them them somehow.
As for examples of others having the same SEO concerns with CMS’s, a quick search found many examples.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/choosing-the-right-cms-platform-for-your-website-from-an-seo-perspective
http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume95/seo-friendly-web-development.htm
http://www.seo.com/blog/lord-of-the-seo-friendly-cms/
http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/64352

[RyanKent]

Below is a link to a relatively clean install of WordPress. A theme and test content has been added. Could you help educate me and share what violations you find?

As a note, this site is close to 2 years old, and was likely a set up and forget it type of thing. There are some user comments which may have invalid external links, but that is not the fault of the site design. Also, the page should be evaluated in more of a standalone context as other pages just offer dummy data so you will experience duplicate content and such issues which are not relevant. The focus is the software architecture offered by WP.

http://www.ndesign-studio.com/demo/wordpress/blog/how-about-a-blog-post-with-longer-title

[RyanKent]

I normally offer the source for quotes, but then again the source is normally in writing or a short video. In this instance, the video is 46 minutes in length. Most of the quotes I shared are in the first few minutes: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/

I see in this post much the same time as your comments in this thread, you suggest that the CMS user gets a programmer to fix the errors. “Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:”

My response had nothing to do with a CMS, but rather a website which is experiencing a URL redirection problem. If any user has a problem with a trailing slash be added, or not being added, to URLs then a fix such as an .htaccess regex expression can be offered to resolve the problem (in a LAMP environment).

The root issue I think is WordPress has made it very easy for novices and those without programming experience to build a website. Many such site owners are completely lost and make tons of errors. They often encounter issues because they are over their head, and then they ask for help. It's a bad stretch to say because some people don't understand or misuse the software that the software is bad. Just today I was asked to evaluate a .NET site and it is poorly designed on multiple levels. Right off the bat the site has 70+ validation errors on the home page. It has plenty of issues which you refer to as violations as well. I would not state .NET is bad for SEO because this particular .NET site is poorly designed for SEO.

PS. Thanks for the friendly debate.

[AlanMosley]

I dont judge things on what others are saying. i refere you to my precvious comment

"I will make my conclusions from the code written by WP amd the violations found by Bing, keep it factual."

No amount of cut and paste comments from the internet will change that.

[AlanMosley]

I suggested that not including a source to your quote, something to suggest others do, not including a qualifying comment or the context the quotes were made in is bias.
I see in this post much the same time as your comments in this thread, you suggest that the CMS user gets a programmer to fix the errors. “Step 2 - Ask your web host or developer to make the following site wide changes:” http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-split-urls-i-don-t-know-what-to-call-this-but-it-s-seriously-messing-up-my-google-analytics-reports

PS I have no problem debating with you ryan.

[RyanKent]

Can you locate a single article by Google, SEOmoz or a reputable SEO who does not have a significant personal interest at stake (i.e. represent a competing platform) which supports the idea "using a CMS is not good for SEO". You are seriously the first and only person I have ever heard make this claim and I tried to locate supporting evidence for it but have failed to find any.

The view you are sharing is unsupported. If you have any evidence to share to the contrary, I would love to see it. I consider myself a student of SEO. There is always something to learn. I would love to learn how this concept can be supported with logic.

[RyanKent]

Alan, it is great you are generous with your time and offer your assistance to others. In your course of doing so, you are "selling" some very unpopular ideas which lacks reputable support.

We all have our own experiences and knowledge to share from. I often have opinions on topics which I am reluctant to share because frankly I lack substantiating evidence. If I do share such beliefs I clearly indicate they are my beliefs and not necessarily accepted by the SEO community. I would suggest you may wish to do the same, especially in this regard.

I made the statement Wordpress is OUTSTANDING for SEO. It is a correct and accurate statement, and it is supported by industry experts and results! I went to the effort and obtained relevant and exact quotes from someone you have quoted repeatedly in an effort to support those statements, and you simply disregard them. Now you claim Matt Cutts is biased? Do you sincerely believe Matt would have made any of those statements if he did not 100% believe them to be true? Matt seems like a role model for credibility.

I suggest caution. You are sharing inaccurate statements. You are a .NET programmer and seem to have an extreme bias towards everything Microsoft related. You have numerous responses where you praise .NET and bash competitors. You praise Bing and bash Google. By doing such you risk losing credibility with a lot of good people.

I should add when I perform a search in Google.com for "website valdiation" there are 10 very relevant results returned. When I perform a similar search for "website violation", not one of the top 10 results is relevant to Bing violations. This indicates you are using a very unpopular term which you, as a .NET specialist might be aware of, but the rest of the world isn't.

A final note. I have no problem with this conversation and I hope you do not either. If everyone agrees then the world quickly becomes a boring place. I learn a lot more from passionate discussions of opposing viewpoints then I do with the many "I agree" discussions. I hope you feel the same way.

[AlanMosley]

you have done agood job in visiuals and layout, but as i said using a CMS is not good for SEO. There is a trade off.

What i would suggest is creating your landing pages by hand, making them perfect, use a CMS for pages where ranking is not crucial. There you get the best of both worlds.

[AlanMosley]

You have repeated the point about some big websites using CMS, this time you state they do it because of SEO, how you know that, I don’t think you do.
Go back and look at all the violations I have pointed out in WP sites, the have a familiar pattern, and guess what, Matt Cutts has them on his site also. I don’t think Matt is a programmer and his quotes were made a WordCamp, A gathering of WordPress users. You also left this bit of his quote
“Now this is kind of a broad statement”
Hardly unbiased. Talking at a WordPress gathering, I assume to a lot of non-programmers. I don’t think he would be saying the same to a load of programmers.
When making quotes you should post a source, so that it can be checked for acuracy

Ryan in your haste to disagree with me, you made a silly comment.
"CMS software is OUTSTANDING for SEO"
Now you say there are ok as long as you go along and fix all the problems.
Violations is the term used by Bing, the Violations I am talking about are the exact violations found by Bing as stated by Bing(see link), using the Bing SEO toolkit, I think that makes it a industry term. You may not think much of them, but the important thing is that Bing does.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-interview-the-bing-team
There is no way to sugar coat this Ryan.
 You may write long answers and answer a lot of posts, but I don’t think you know much about building web sites.
I will make my conclusions from the code written by WP amd the violations found by Bing, keep it factual.

[RyanKent]

CMS is not good for SEO, they create sloppy code

Violations are not good for SEO, and CMS write code full of Violations, what is so hard to understand?

That is absolutely untrue. In what way is the code sloppy? If I have a WordPress, Joomla or any other site and the code validates using the W3C standards, how is the code "sloppy"?

How do you define a "violation"? The primary standard for web development I am aware of it the W3C standards. A clean install of many CMS solutions validates just fine. Some people choose to install templates which do not validate, and other site owners or developers make changes which do not validate, but neither is the fault of the CMS.

You can pick a single aspect of WordPress or any CMS. Maybe you don't care for their header tags or permalink structure, but it all can very easily be modified just as an solution can so these really aren't factors.

I still have not seen any basis whatsoever to support your claim that WordPress is bad for SEO.Your statements are very vague and do not have any traction. "Sloppy code" and "violations" are not industry terms. Please detail in exactly what way is WP sloppy or a violation, then we can better discuss the idea of WP being bad for SEO.

To the contrary, I was unable to find anyone who supports your statement outside of an article on SEObullshit.com. Fitting right?

There are tons of experts who agree WordPress is OUTSTANDING for SEO. They use those very words. Since I know you are a big fan of Matt Cutts, I'll share some quotes from Matt specific to WordPress:

When asked "How to do better in Google" Matt's answer is "WordPress is a great choice".

Other quotes from Matt:

• he describes WP users as "intelligent" for choosing WP

• "WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues"

• "WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of SEO"

• "WordPress is a fantastic piece of software"

• "That's how good WP is, you don't need to modify that much [to achieve good seo]"

The list goes on and on. Don't forget the fact Matt uses WP himself. Matt is basically a walking billboard advertisement for WP.

I try to be easy going about differing opinions but advising others that "WordPress is bad for SEO" is so blatantly false, I can't let it go. The opposite is true. WordPress is outstanding for SEO and is a preferred choice for many of the world's top sites, even companies like CNN, Time magazine, the NFL and other brands recognized as the top in the world who have the money and resources to choose any solution they want, and they choose WP in large part because it is an excellent solution for SEO. It is not only excellent, it is a superior choice for many owners.

Again I would like to clarify, I am NOT a WP fan boy although the statement WP is bad for SEO seemingly has made me sound like one.

[AlanMosley]

I really can see any logic in your comments Ryan, CMS is not good for SEO, they create sloppy code, if you don’t have the development skills then sure use a CMS but they are not good for SEO.
Violations are not good for SEO, and CMS write code full of Violations, what is so hard to understand?
Many sites are run on CMS yes, but not because they are good for SEO. Once again your logic does not add up.
i have a blog, i use Orchard CMS, because I don’t have time to write my own, so I sacrifice something in SEO, that’s I choice I made, but it is still not good for SEO
To say that CMS is outstanding for SEO because you can produce content faster, also does not add up. You can write content in Word for windows and save as html very quickly, but I would not recommend it for SEO. I think you are better doing less correctly then doing more incorrectly

[RyanKent]

Hi Carl,

There are many things I like about your site. Your name is a bit catchy, you have social engagement with facebook and twitter, and you offer a very clear purpose statement at the top of the home page "Shop all the UK's leading Tights and Leggings websites at once with Bright Tights. Find the latest fashions for less!!".

There are a ton of opportunities to improve the site. Too many to list out in a Q&A. Some suggestions:

• Pick up the Beginner's Guide to SEO and review it while examining your site. The Guide is a very fast, easy read and offers great advice.

• Take a close look at competing sites. Don't just look at affiliate sites. Check out Macy's, Nordstrom's and other retailers. Look at what things you like about their sites and try to incorporate them into your site.

• Offer more. The basis for affiliate marketing might be the simple product feed but if you want to stand out from the crowd of hundreds of other sites which are doing the exact same thing as you are, you must offer strong reasons for users to visit your website. Offer larger, more detailed images. Offer videos. Gather user feedback (comments). Write detailed articles of how each product compares to competitors, what famous people are wearing the product, etc.

You are presently offered a very "canned" site. It doesn't stand out. Therefore, your SEO results are not standing out either. If you can treat this site as your main focus, as if this was your one and only website, then you can build the brand and site into something special. Otherwise, you wont compete against others who have only one website and give it their all, or others who may have multiple sites but they hire SEOs and developers to make their site's stand out.

CMS is not really good for seo, wordpress IMO is one of the worse.

@Alan, this statement you shared is just awful. Sorry but there is no way I can sugar coat it.

Some of the most successful sites in the word are run on CMS platforms. The WhiteHouse.org is run on Drupal. TechCrunch is run on WordPress. CNN and Time magazine run on WordPress. TED, UPS, BoingBoing.com, NBC Sports, Tiffany Jewelers, Dow Jones, LA Times, InStyle magazine, the NFL, the list is endless. Millions of sites are run on WordPress and many of them lead competitive fields and rank at the top of search engines.

CMS software is OUTSTANDING for SEO. Many of the world's most popular sites, which also rank at the top of SERPs, run on WordPress. If a small to medium business owner wants to open a basic site for their business, WordPress or a similar CMS is very likely the best business decision for time, money and SEO.

As a post-note, I am not a "word press guy". I have worked with an incredibly wide variety of software solutions and WP is not my personal preference. But the statement that WordPress is bad for SEO, that is simply wrong. Any software can have good or bad SEO results depending upon it's implementation. A properly set up WP site can earn top rankings in SERPs. In fact, it will likely perform better then many other platforms with an equivalent cost to build the site.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Thanks again for looking at my site.

I have addressed the redirect issues. A plugin was installed to redirect all not found queries to the homepage, this was because the url structure on the store was changed and products which are indexed in google are no longer on the site. I will spent some time properly and set up proper redirects for each page in the htaccess. This is also the reason a few categories were redirecting to the home page.

This will sound very bad from someone who runs an seo business but I completely overlooked the alt text (oops). Working on getting this fixed now.

I will review the general html errors and see what I can come up with. I don't normally make websites but thought I would do this one to try some ideas while my staff worked on other work. That'll teach me!

[AlanMosley]

The ones going to the home page are because all 404's are 301ed to teh home page

try

http://brighttights.com/gobalygook

this is not a good idea,

It is a link juice leak, prooable 100% as it is on mass. it os also what Goolge call a soft 404.

Are you getting soft 404 errors in GWMT?

[Grumpy_Carl]

Eeeek wish I hadn't asked now!, only joking, thanks for the feedback.

I know what you are saying about wordpress, the trouble is that we use an extra supplier to manage the datafeeds and they only work on wordpress so that's an issue I may have to look into.

Not sure why that category is taking you back to the homepage, the others work fine so I will play with that and see what's up.

thanks again

[AlanMosley]

i had a bit of a look at your site, the first think i noticed is you have thousands of un-necessary redirects. each one of them leaks link juice. you could save this by fixing these.

Your site was made by wordpress, wp is famouse for these sort of leaks.

here is an example

The link to "http://brighttights.com/store/category/c641013/" has resulted in HTTP redirection to "http://brighttights.com/".

Why not link directly to the destination page and save the link juice?

It is even worse as so many of them 301 to the home page, Bing for one have stated that they will dismiss mass 301's like this, so you are proabbaly losing all link juice..

You have thousands of html errors example

The page at "http://brighttights.com/" contains invalid markup.
The Tag 'p' was not closed correctly, the Tag 'td' was closed instead.

therse can stop search engines seing your content

You have thousands of opertunities to use alt tags, there are heaps of missing description tags,  a few titiles too long and other errors.

i would look at the un-necessary redirects first.

CMS is not really good for seo, wordpress IMO is one of the worse.