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Just about everyone online tells us that we should all be using wordpress because it is quick and easy to use and also because Google loves it. I am a big fan of WordPress myself and I use it for many different blogs. This site is a wordpress blog and I have no plans to change that anytime soon. But... my experience recently makes me wonder if wordpress is always the right choice.
I have a website in a pretty competitive market. I purchased the site a couple of years ago and it has been sitting around the number 5 position for searches for it's main keyword pretty much ever since. I never did anything to promote or develop that website. Maybe I added a couple of backlinks but literally just a dozen or two. It was a plain and fairly ugly html website and all I ever did was to change a couple of the affiliate links. I am not even sure if I changed all of them, that's how little work I did to the site.
Earlier this year I decided I should spend some time and completely revamp the site and I decided to put it on a wordpress blog. I spent several days setting up the blog and transferring all the articles over to the new blog. This was a month or so ago and I recently checked my Google results. What did I find? The website that has been consistently in the top ten search results for the last two years has all but disappeared from the first page. Before the change there were a few dozen keywords showing up on the first page for searches there now appears to be only one and that is at position number ten!
So what are we to make of this? I am disappointed. As far as I am concerned I have improved the site. The articles are almost identical to the original html versions but the site looks better and I have added more pages, information and offers. WordPress blogs have more code to make up the page than a simple html website with various links and menus and I wonder if this has reduced the value G sees in the site which, if true, would suggest that a simple site with less code is more effective in the eyes of the big G searchbot.
This is something I need to investigate further but right now I am regretting transferring the site over to WordPress. I had planned to work through many of my sites and change them over to WP but now I think that might be unwise. Maybe I should have tried it out first with a less successful site as this is obviously costing me money in lost revenues now but I do like WordPress with it's ease of use and appearance so I will persevere for now and hope that this is a temporary setback but the lesson must surely be this. Just because lots of people tell you WP is the best thing since sliced bread don't assume that is always the case. As always, test and test again to establish what works best for you and your websites.
I have this theory, as yet unproven. The easier it is to do something the less it is rated by Google. So, easy to get backlinks would be of less value than hard to get backlinks. Easy to build website, i.e. wordpress blog, less value than html sites. You would think that what is basically the same site would be rated basically the same by the search engines but apparently not so something has been downgraded and it would appear to be the platform used to produce the site.
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New blog post – Should You Use WordPress For Your Website?: http://tinyurl.com/y9uzc9o check it out