It has been a while since Michel and others switched from Movable Type to WordPress... for those of you that did, would you do it again?

MT has some new updates but the plugins and themes available for WP appear to be superior.

But I have two questions...

1. Since WP is free and so many "spammers" use it, is there a chance that Google and others will demote it in their listings since it has a telltail footprint?

2. I know Michel has his personal findings but how does WP rank better -- for the same blog (ported entries) -- than MT? MT uses "real" pages (static .html) and WP uses virtual pages (.php).

I am about to create a new blog and am trying to decide beteen WP and MT.

Thanks for your feedback.

WordPress is cleaning up their act with spammers, as you probably noticed from their recent cease and desist blitzkrieg.

That said, I have read ample -- and I mean hundreds! -- of studies, tests and actual case studies (comparing MT to WP). You probably know some of these names...

John Chow dot Com The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul (a VC who uses/watches blogs alot)

Andy Beard (great testing resource!)

Lorelle on WordPress (a blogging queen)

Blogging Pro*News, plugins and themes for blogging applications

John Scott’s Internet Marketing Blog. www.internet-marketing-blog.com

Tech News,Tutorials,Blog Tips,WordPress Themes,Plugins and more

Aaron Wall's SEO Book.com

And I could go on and on. But the larger concensus is WP over MT. There are pros and cons, but there are ample reasons that would take me forever to list on this page to prove to you that WP is better.

The main reason? Google loves WP more than MT. It's a fact -- many tests have been conducted that show that. There are, of course, tons of SEO tricks to make WP even more googilicious.

For example, MT uses underscores within file keywords, while WP uses dashes. Google prefers dashes. Then there's folksonomy (tagging), SEO plugins and other little "magic tricks" behind the scenes with WP that will boost your traffic and rankings. (Such as Google Sitemap creation and pinging, but also tagging and sitemap-tag plugins that add tag folders to your sitemap, which Google loves, etc.)

I've been reading many of them, tested quite a few, and WP always seems to come out on top. I share this information with our paying members, so to be fair to them I'll stop here.

But I can tell you this. In tests, the three top blogging platforms, in order, are WP, then Expression Engine, then (and only then) MT. Everything else pretty much sucks.

Okay, okay! You've convinced me! I've seen the light and have been converted.

Hallelujah and pass the collection plate!

Wow Michel, thank you for the analysis. This is something I've been wondering about but never got around to looking into. Thanks as well for the links, because I wouldn't know what sources were credible and which were hot air. So I greatly appreciate the reading list too!!!

Bailey

Hi Michel

Thanks for the mention in the list, but I am not sure I deserve to be there yet.

Brian also asked me this question directly yesterday (via my contact form), and I thought I would include my reply here.


It should be also noted that there are some significant performance benefits coming in WP2.1 and if performance is a key criteria for selection, there have been quite a few technical discussions on ways to improve it on the wp-hackers mailing list.

I definitely want to add one more resource to watch for blogging best practices.

Sylvie and Michel's blogs and in particular Sylvie's outsourcing service Workaholics4Hire: Connecting the Work at Home and Telecommuting Community With Jobs

I haven't used Sylvie's service, but I am impressed with the work they do.

Recently I explained one idea to Michel in an email exchange, the development team took it on-board and 24hrs later the strategy was fully integrated into one of Michel's sites.

The integration was "slick" as if it had always been there

But what is equally telling, it hasn't been implemented across the board and that is also smart.

Michel tests everything

Thanks, Andy. In fact, in the spirit of giving this season let me share with you the tip Andy gave me, with a few more I learned from him and others.

After Andy's tip, I did some significant changes this week to my blogs and boards. One of the things you may have noticed is my brand-new tag cloud on my own blog.

A tag cloud is part of the tagging system made popular by social network sites, like del.icio.us, Flickr.com, Technorati.com, and Digg.com.

It’s what is called “folksonomy,” which is a user-driven classification system — as opposed to the traditional “taxonomy,” which is hierarchical classification system (like categories and pageranks, for example).

The cloud is basically a list of tags (i.e., tags are keywords attributed to the post or article) and lists them in order of density (popularity), based on how many posts have the tag.

Andy noticed I had some tags with Technorati, but now they are all internal for a reason. Too many external links bleed my pagerank. (I'll come back to this with a few extra tips about how to stop PR bleeding.)

So, with the tag cloud, the bigger the word, therefore the more common the tag is — or in terms of what it means to the reader, the more popular a term is on the website. When you click on a tag link, it lists all the articles/posts associated with the term.

This is helpful on many levels, not the least of which is adding more pages to be indexed in search engines. This is cleverly done by a few plugins: Google Sitemap Generator, Ultimate Tag Warrior, and Google Sitemap Ultimate Tag Addon plugins. (The last one I learned from Andy Beard.)

This means that pages with tags, which are keywords or phrases a post has been tagged with, is classified under a new folder system like domain/tag/keyword. If you went to www.MichelFortin.com/tag/copywriting/ for example, it will list all the articles I tagged with “copywriting.”

But the beauty is, this is an additional page in Google’s eyes. Why? Because in addition to the Google sitemap’s list of pages and archive folders in the automatically generated sitemap, the tagging system and addon plugins add these additional "tag" folders (i.e., more pages and links to be indexed) to the sitemap — and are crawled by Google (and now Yahoo and MSN, which have since adopted the Google sitemap protocol).

So this means another 500 extra pages added to the index without additional work or content. Better yet, these pages are associated with tags (keywords), which gives the page more oomph in terms of targeted keyword searches on the engines.

Also, Ultimate Tag Warrior allows you to add your tags (the keywords per post) you specify in the meta-keywords tags in your html code automatically.

Meta-tags were once falling out of favor with search engines. But now, with Web 2.0, where classifications are more user-driven as they are going from taxonomy to folksonomy, meta-tags are slowly coming back into favor with some search engines. (The trend is actually on the rise.)

And based on the poll I had last month on what my subscribers wanted to see more of, I added a new plugin called “popularity contest” by Alex King, which rates posts by traffic, comments and hits. You can see the top 25 most popular posts here. (You can also see the score underneath each post headline.)

I also removed all the date-based archives, the blogroll and the underscores from post titles (leftover from the migration from Movable Type) because they are all pagerank leaks. (I’ve read sufficient research, and there’s ample evidence of this on some of the top SEO blogs out there.)

One plugin that did this for me is Steve Smith’s Underscore-to-Dash plugin. (Don’t you love WordPress?) You can also read a lot on Steve Smith's blog about the whole underscore vs. dash controversy (Steve used to be a die-hard underscore fan and has since changed his mind based on research that prove that dashes are more favored by the search engines).

If you're porting from MT to WP, Brian, that last plugin will be very helpful.

And there’s also a few more plugins that allowed me to accomplish the migration -- and this, in a day rather than a week (such as redirecting old articles to their new “dashed” locations so I won’t lose search engine traffic). It's called "WP Permalink Redirect" (just Google it and you'll find it).

And finally, a useful plugin is called “Optimal Title” plugin, along with "SEO Title Tag" plugin. The latter lets you customize titles within the post add the "tag" names from Ultimate Tag Warrior archive pages into the title tag, for even more keyword-rich titles.

The former (Optimal Title) allows the title tag of the page to be optimized for search engines — namely, by changing the order, with the mroe keyword-rich post title first rather than the blog name first.

Meta-tags aside, the title tag is the most important part of the post. This is not only parsed by the search engines but also the first thing they see, which is the title that shows up on the top of your browser for you and me.

But for search engines, the title tag is one of the first tags parsed in HTML pages, and they favor the first few keywords in the title tag. Problem is, most blogs have the blog title first, before the post title.

Most post titles contain keywords, but if the search engine see blog names first and, if they have a maximum character count, they stop short of reading the rest of your title, which may contain your post's title and therefore important keywords.

For example, instead of this…

Your Blog’s Name > Post Title With Keywords

You get this…

Post Title With Keywords > Your Blog’s Name

There’s a lot more, but this is all for now

(Thanks, Andy!)

Oh, I forgot. I did say I'll come back to PR bleeding.

Well, a couple of other things I've done that helped reduced it. First, I removed the technorati links -- and made the tags internal. Second, I removed my blogroll completely. (Another tip from Andy.) And third, I removed the dated archives -- and made the permalinks show as post titles only.

So for example, Wordpress' pretty permalink default is...

Domain Name > Year > Month > Post Title

Now it's...

Domain Name > Post Title

Dated archives still exist. But the single posts are now cut short, removing dates -- since dates do kill PR, particularly older posts.

Could you point me to where I can learn more about using WP as a CMS?

Wordpress Tutorials - Blogging Tutorials - Video Training Series
Let me see if I can find some more...

wordpress as cms
* Feature: 5 Reasons to Use WordPress as CMS*by*Blogging Pro
What is “Using WordPress as CMS”? | blogHelper
WordPress 1.5 as a Web Site CMS | alexking.org
Welcome | Turbocharged