Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
desai bhavesh: I am taking control of an old site. It was made using proprietary CMS. How do I know whether it it SEO friendly or not? ;
Patrick Rabanser: I think you can't tell from the CMS if that site is SEO friendly or not. There are CMS that are SEO friendlier then others (out of the box). But you can crash a wibsites Rankings even with the best CMS (or never get ranked in the first place)!
For the beginning try to check all the data you have available, then you should have a initial Idea of the Websites performance.
eBizWebpages: If the site is well listed already then the CMS is SEO friendly. ; If it isn't, then it's not. ; Unless no SEO has ever been done in the first place.
What is SEO these days anyway? ; It certainly isn't a bunch of meta tags and such. ; So the CMS shouldn't really matter as long as it produces clean code, correctly applies titles, and generates page names to match up with useful page content. ; Most of everything else that matters for SEO now is offsite.
- Eric W.
Ross Barefoot: I respectfully disagree with +eBizWebpages that most of everything that matters is offsite, although I agree that SEO is hard to define.
There are many ways a CMS can be unfriendly, but they are tough to enumerate here. ; ; ; Here's a few:
- It can create unfriendly URLs using lots of parameters - It can not allow you to set appropriate title and meta description tags (title tags are still very important in establishing relevance, and meta description tags are important in aiding click-through conversions from SERPs) - The CMS can create inefficient pages by placing CSS and js on the pages rather than as includes - In a practical sense if the CMS makes it difficult to create and distribute new content it indirectly will hinder Internet Marketing - As I'm writing this I keep thinking of ways that a CMS can make your Internet Marketing, including SEO, more or less effective. ; (Maybe I'll do a blog post around this.)
If you're not familiar with SEO vocabulary I apologize, just trying to put out a few observations quickly.
Jose Terrier: Good answer +Ross Barefoot . I would add that a non-SEO friendly CMS may create duplicate content issues by placing the same content on /category/ and /tags/ directories.
Patrick Rabanser: I agree with +Ross Barefoot ; At the end CMS won't bring any benefits to SEO & Online Marketing. It will make your Workflow faster but it takes away the control of essential parts of your Website. I'm looking forward to read your blog post about this subject and I'm curious what the results will be.
eBizWebpages: +Ross Barefoot Let me be more specific. ; What I meant was as long as the CMS was outputting clean code, useful custom page titles, and page URLs that the user can control/customize without parameters then that's good enough. ; After that, it basically all comes down to the actual content on the site as far as onsite requirements go. ; Everything else that really makes a big difference is offsite.
Sure there's lots of little things that can sometimes make a little difference. ; But too many people stress on that without ever doing the big things that make the big differences.
For example, don't stress out if you can't figure out how to put a keyword in an image alt tag if the site has a poor or no link profile.
Before knocking the CMS you have, examine if any of the minimal onsite SEO work has even been done. ; If not, then do it. ; If you can't then you know it's not SEO friendly and look for a replacement.
Bob Rom: You should check how the pages output the site content, H1 and h2 title tags, metas for pages, check for duplicate content, etc. Use browser extensions like SEO quake or other SEO extensions that can tell you the page elements and what you got and what you don't. Use Google search to find out what pages Google indexes. See if there is a robots.txt and a sitemap. Well, many of the above are off page SEOs but you must check those.
Pankaj Singh: You can use www.quicksprout.com for website and point out the issues.
desai bhavesh: My +1 to all of you. Thank you. ;how can i find whether CMS generate duplicate content or not? do you know any plugin or site which can help me? I will also wait for blog by +Ross Barefoot ; on role of CMS in seo it! And guys thanks again.
Pankaj Singh: Try this www.copyscape.com to check duplicate content, for more info you can follow me on @kpankaj812
Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:52:07 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/how_do_i_know_whether_a_cms_is_seo_friendly_or_not
Ross Barefoot: +eBizWebpages good clarification. ; I think we're more or less on the same page.
I am taking control of an old site. It was made using proprietary CMS. How do I know whether it it SEO friendly or not? ? 
