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I have never built a site that way myself, but I have rebuilt a couple that were.  I was specifically asked to rebuild a site that had been built in this manner because the client found it cumbersome to use.  Because everything was a post just divided up by categories they had to click posts and then select the appropriate category to see the posts they were interested in.

When creating posts if they forgot to set the category, the post didn't show up anywhere on the site because all archives were generated by category.  Easy enough fix once they caught it, but why bother?  I don't think this is easier for a webmaster really more of a pain.

With a little training on wordpress, my clients have always appreciated the fact that when they want to post to their blog, they click "posts" and when they want to add a page to the website they click "pages."  In fact, I use custom post types to handle different types of entries for my clients because that breaks it down even further for my clients and they prefer that.  An example would be creating a custom post type for "properties" for a property management company.  But what exactly do you mean by "routine edits"?  I think of routine edits as updating telephone numbers, addresses, etc which I would think you would handle with widgets in any event.

I am not sure what you mean by "less files."  As all entries whether posts, pages, custom post type, etc are stored to the posts table in wordpress there are no more or less files or tables based upon how you enter the information into wordpress.  So, unless I am missing something or misunderstood your comment, there is no benefit there.

From an SEO perspective, using the structure that is built into wordpress should again be a benefit.  For example the Yoast SEO plugin allows for you to template your meta titles based upon post type (page or post), although manually setting them is always best. The permalink structure allows you to have dates shown for posts, but leave them out for pages and other post types.  So the added flexibility of uses posts, pages & other post types is a benefit for SEO as well.

Finally, since Google is believed to use categories and tags to determine what the content is about, you are probably losing out on a opportunity for SEO benefit by using them for site architecture.

Honestly, I think using categories to set the architecture of the site is a throwback to when wordpress was much less robust than it is now.  It was a workaround to be able to divide information up in a logically fashion on a site when you had no other options.  Now we do.

Good luck!

I'm an online marketing consultant and I work with a variety of agencies who handle Adwords.  I keep running into an issue where agencies want to set up Adwords in a proprietary account for my clients rather than in the client's account and manage it through MCC.  I have just run into again and this time the agency claims they are protecting their Adwords "secret sauce" but that the client will still have full access to keywords, negative keywords, Ad copy, etc.  It just doesn't pass the sniff test with me.

Can anyone tell me if there are some legitimate reasons for an agency to do this other than to simply try to hold data hostage so that clients can't leave them without loss?  I am inclined to tell my client they should run away screaming, but thought I would bounce it off you smart people first.

Thanks!

Hi Jason,

You are correct on all counts.  There are a number of advantages to having the "like" button on your website be for your website as opposed to your facebook page.  The top advantages are:

1. Google doesn't care if the count is shown on your website if it is for your facebook page.  Any boost received would go to your facebook page

2. The send button only works properly if the like button points to the website and not the facebook page.

3. What I just discovered, if someone "likes" your facebook page from a like button on your website, they don't count the like unless the person also goes to your facebook page. So really the button is useless.

The only reason I was just putting a like button for their facebook business page on my clients' websites is because most of my clients are so small that if they get more than 100 likes they are doing well.  So, since most people won't "like" both a website and the same company's facebook page it helped make their like count look better to have all their eggs in one basket so to speak.  Unfortunately with these latest changes I am going to need to go back and change this for my clients.

Good luck!

Hey Brent,

Thanks for the response.  I have a follow up question.  So are you saying that if seomoz is showing a ranking of 9th for a keyword term but when I, or my client, search that same keyword term it comes up 37th (with personalized results turned off) that it should show up as 9th in time?  For example, I have another client whose ranking for a search terms has been on the 4th page for 3 months, but seomoz has shown it bouncing between page 1 & 2 for that same time period.  If seomoz is right, I am going to be a hero, but if wrong, it looks like everything I have done for SEO for them has done nothing.

I noticed you said you can predict changes "within a few days" which would suggest that my 3 month scenario is likely to be caused by something else like user error.  Usually I see user error working the other the way though.  The client or I have clicked through to a website multiple times so it comes up higher in search results than it really is due to personalization.  But, in this case, the results are coming up substantially lower than seomoz is showing.

Thanks again!