Google's War against Wordpress! Is it BAD for SEO? Post-Panda questions and advice!

thsadmin - "adding feeds to the bottom of your posts" is definitely something I would consider... Regularly updated content... I don't see how it could go wrong... The only problem is that I would essentially be adding a list of external links on each site... But I am thinking about it.

YMC - I have used Yoasts plugin... It definitely helps. I personally prefer All-In-One SEO though.. Have you tried that? As for your situation, I have to say that it's a tough one. The thing is that the core functionality of WP involves some SEO NO-NOs. If you were to just make a WP blog, use the default settings and post 5 articles on it with a couple of tags each, then essentially, you would be creating 5 post pages with unique content and about 25 pages with duplicate content (tag pages, archives, category pages... and.... the HOMEPAGE!). Even if you were to try to stop that by no-indexing your other pages, having a site with 30 pages out of which 25 are no-index would definitely not look nice to Google. That's my opinion...

contentboss - No, I am definitely not long tailing it as you defined "long tailing" in your previous post. I am "tailing" it though.. My posts are targeting a group of keywords - I just try to diversify by targeting a more general keyword for the whole site and using more specific keywords for each article as to provide an all-around coverage of the main keyword. You also mentioned clickbank - I don't use ANY affiliate links on the sites that were hit. They either had Adsense or no sort of monetization whatsoever. Never used spun articles or anything of that sort either... Not even carefully constructed rewrites.. All the articles on the sites are unique AND all the articles used for linkbuilding purposes are also unique.

Having said that, I have strong reasons to believe that the issue is NOT about linkbuilding. Throughout the several discussions I've had with SEOs, we tried to examine whether any of my link sources had been devalued, but that is not the case. Sure, I did have some ezinearticles for example, and they got hit so maybe any links from them have lost some value, but we are not talking about a small drop in the rankings which could be explained by that - we are talking about sites that were ranking in the top 10 going down to the 100s.

To contentboss - You say that you track a multitude of sites... Did any of those rank in the top 10 for keywords with at least a few thousands searches? The reason I am asking is that I noticed that some of my other sites that were not in the top 10 did not get hit - at least not to that extent. For example, if I was ranking 25th, I may be ranking 35th or 40th after the update, which could be the result of various factors.

Another thing to consider is that maybe Google will not rank WP blogs for product keywords. For example - a keyword like "blue chairs" would be considered an "action" keyword (the searcher is looking to BUY blue chairs) so a blog (which primarily contains TEXT and is not an e-commerce site) would not be a good result. Any thoughts?

 

That's OK - just do no-follow and open the links in new window to keep your traffic... I see a lot of sites have adapted this idea. Simplepie still is effective for RSS feeds in wordpress.

 

There is no fact to anything that you stated so I won't be saying that default themes has something to do with Google or its rankings. The rule is still the same if your content has the right keyword density then it will have a higher chance of being in the first page no matter what the site's rank is.

 

Yes most of wordpress blogs affected by Google updates...my blog traffic also reduced 60%....

 

Hi,jlaurier,can you tell me how to disabled the feed?thank you

 

My new wordpress blogs are working good.
Are your sites hosted on different IPs?
Is it could be network problem?

 

Are you using the default themes? Do you have the default 3-latest-posts homepage?

My sites are all on different C class IPs, and most of them even on different A, B class IPs.

 

I have quite a few websites, some plain HTML, some Joomla, some Wordpress. They are mostly in the hotel booking area. None of my HTML websites have been dropped as a result of Panda or Penguin and all are doing well for preferred keywords.
Recently, I changed two HTML websites to Wordpress for ease of updating, to add news section etc. I recreated the important pages of the old sites and created my own individual themes (using Artisteer) for the new wordpress sites. I have All-in-one SEO plugin installed.
Rankings for both sites plummeted from Page 1 to nowhere for most of the important keywords within a few weeks (in June). There are no notified penalties on Google WMT.
Strangely my HTML sites which are doing well are rarely updated.
So for me the question still remains: Is Wordpress bad for SEO?

 

You don't consider other factors like
- domain whois info,
- domain registration dates,
- dns update time,
- same ID numbers in HTML codes (analytics, ad publisher ID, etc.)

Using different hosting accounts can not help alone. They will always know which sites you are operating.

 

In my view Wordpress gives a new life to the dull site quite easily. The userfiendly layout and usage makes it the first choice for many so if google has some problem in ranking them it must be serious. The only thing one needs is good SEO practices and implimenation.

 

Well Google is out of Social battle since google +, google buzz google whatever can not compete with faceboook or twitter. And now they are trying to lose the Search Engine battle.

Google or Wordpress? Who would you pick?
Spammers/black hatters always pick Google! They dont care that wordpress is amazing tool that can do amazing things that other CMS cant do. They really dont care about that. They care about Google sending them traffic so they can make money.

So time is ticking away Google is i m 100% sure loosing search engine users in second. Ofcourse braindead users that dont know how to use internet will always use Google unless someone tell them that something else is better. But me and many of the other advanced users that really need to find informations on the internet have notice huge drop in search quality.

When i seek info i really dont like to read .blogspot.com things, netlog.com and stuff like that. If possible i always want to see wikipedia and websites with info for my search. that why i switch to Bing. But Bing have own problems...

So back ontopic: Dont switch Wordpress over Google. Take Wordpress and if it is true what the OP is saying then all spammers and other blackhatters will drop wordpress... And then maybe Google will like it again... (whatever, like google is god... but when you ask him to give you info he gives u .blogspot.com page... lol)

 

why should google hate wordpress? unique theme is not the matter, but unique content. also @thsadmin, 100 sites are ok, there is nothing spammy as long you don't spam

 

i have developed many wordpress site for clients all are doing good. Google have not yet penalized this sites.

 

I have polled on another forum and the consensus there is that Word press has not been singled out. If a person uses certain practices they will be penalized Word press or not.

 

I second you it is indeed a useful and informative thread there is doubt about it that spammers use wp mostly.