I hear this all the time when people are talking about old-school static HTML sites versus newer WordPress sites. They say it loud and proud as if it were a law of nature like gravity or something.
Google Loves WordPress!
The truth is (as far as I know) that there is no real data that says Google prefers static WordPress versus HTML (or vice-versa). There is no reason that they should care — and I don’t think that they do.
People say “Google loves WordPress” because they see WordPress because they see WordPress sites doing well in Google. The question is this: is this correlation, or causation? In other words, are these sites doing well because of WordPress, or for some other reason.
If two sites were COMPLETELY identical, Goggle would not care if a site was WordPress or Static HTML. In fact, if they were truly completely identical, Google could not tell easily which was which.
I don’t think Google loves WordPress.
Why WordPress Sites Perform Well
Rather, I think Google loves what most WordPress installations do automatically (and most static HTML sites do NOT do at all).
If you install WordPress with a decent theme and use a few popular plugins, you get some killer stuff that is not present on many plain-jane HTML sites:
- Ping-O-Matic to announce new content
- Blog pinging to encourage back-linking
- User-generated content (comments)
- An RSS feed (promotes traffic)
- Auto SEO optimized titles and URLs (in most cases)
- Good automatic intra-site linking (in most cases)
- et cetera
This is why “Google loves WordPress”. It is not because there is some unfair bias in Google or some magic in WordPress itself. All of the above things are possible with an HTML site, but people usually do not do them.
So, while it looks like Google loves WordPress, what they really love are well constructed sites. Constructing site well is something that WordPress does automatically.
Build good site, follow the webmaster guidelines, and you too will live a long healthy and happy web life.
photo credit: AlbertaAndMe
