Can a CMS affect SEO?

[TeamacPaints]

As the title really, I run www.specialistpaintsonline.co.uk and 6 months ago when I first got it it had bad links which google had put a penalty against it so losts it value.

However the penalty was lift in Sept, the site corresponds to all guidelines and seo work has been done and constantly monitored.

the issue I have is sales and visits have not gone up, we are failing fast and running on 2 or 3 sales a month isn't enough to cover any sort of cost let alone wages.

hence my question can the cms have anything to do with it?

Im at a loss and go grey any help or advice would be great.

thanks in advance.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I want to say I agree with Tom I focused strictly on your CMS and as Tom said essentially you have been hurt by your lack of relevant root domains pointing to your site.

Unfortunately after penalty given with an excellent cleanup Google is a little more wary of everything you do. So when you try to earn these new links which will need to do to compete for specialist paints an extremely competitive keyword. Be extremely careful that you do not cross any boundaries.

Take a look at the information below as well I did quite a few scans on your site and hopefully that will be of some help to you.

Respectfully,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

to answer the 1st question. Of course a CMS can affect how website performs. Meaning some are built better than others. If you had a CMS that was to produce all flash content that would be a pretty bad CMS.

I honestly prefer WordPress it works beautifully with search engines as well as people. The important thing though is that you can create a website that is easy for the end user and accomplishes what they want because that's exactly what Google wants.

when I used a tool I use a lot from Internet marketing ninjas in order to scan your site for issues it was giving me a 408 error that error is

• "408 Request Timeout (Couldn't find the user in time)"
• you can see what I mean right here I attempted this 8 times.

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator/tmp/772958e055a835d23c6db867963439d1.html

I used a another tool screaming frog SEO spider I highly recommend this tool it is free for up to 500 pages though the Pro version gives you the ability to fix a lot of problems instantly.

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

Here the results

https://app.box.com/files/0/f/550482746/1/f_11967719472  crawl overview

https://app.box.com/s/nvyyszluy9mb9rhx1ms6  redirect chain check

https://app.box.com/files/0/f/550482746/1/f_11967725394  all links

I would doubt the CMS has anything to do with your issues. Based on using this tool below called feed the bot

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/test.php

I was able to crawl your site with no problems. That replicates googles ability to crawl a website. If there was an issue with your CMS blocking Google bot I would've picked it up there

It seems your CMS is custom-made I have never heard of this particular one however that does not mean it's bad. I would recommend using WordPress if you you build the site for any reason. It is very search engine friendly and has a extremely large pool of developers.

Use some of the tools found in this link to scan for other issues

http://www.feedthebot.com

aside from that I would guess that your prior penalty may have something to do with a drop or he could be the lack of content one your site. Overall you do not have a lot of content meeting over 200 or 300 words per page I would start by issuing another question regarding whatever you find to be off about your site. Or something more detailed about what exactly you suspect is a problem why you think it's your CMS? I would really love to hear some more info about this I hope the data I've provided is able to tell you that I do not believe it is your CMS that is harming you.

Download screaming frog and use it

sincerely,

Thomas

[TomRayner]

Hi there

Well yes, a CMS can have an effect on SEO performance.  If the CMS makes elements on the page uncrawlable, or the website load very slowly, this could have an adverse effect on your performance.  Similarly, if the CMS produces a lot of duplicate webpages, URL or content, which can often be a problem with e-commerce sites, that could lead to algorithmic Panda penalties.

However, looking at your homepage, the Googlebot sees this on the page - so it looks as though everything is fine with its crawl there.  In addition, your site load speed appears to be good.  I also can't find any obvious duplicate content or URL issues - the search function works well and each product listing looks to have good unique content, with no duplications of the pages (at least at very first glance).

So your CMS, at first glance, looks to be working really well.  The issue that I see is that, as a result of your bad backlink cleanup, you have a very small amount of links pointing to your domain.  Majestic SEO is reporting that you have gone from a peak of 9000 backlinks and 1000 root domains to just 69 backlinks and 25 root domains.  That is a huge reduction in links.  While being completely necessary, it essentially means that your off-site SEO is back to zero and so you need to earn more links. Now, it's about quality rather than quantity, but to give you a quick example: the top 5 results for "specialist paints" each have over 10,000 links to their domain.

You've done a great job with your onsite optimisation and an extremely thorough link removal process.  What you're left with, however, is a site with very few links and so not a lot of power to help it increase its visibility in organic search.  I would say that you need to replace the bad links you have had removed with strong, contextual and high-quality links in order to start performing well again.

I hope this helps.