Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Rob Baker: Somebody told me that CMS systems don't do as well as sites not built on them. ;Any truth in that?
W.E. Jonk: Google doesn't really care about the CMS as long as you serve crawlable/high quality/ unique content. Therefore I wouldn't build a site on Flash, for example, because it is hard to crawl.... (although you can setup a crawl scheme)
Rob Baker: Thanks! That's what I thought as well, not sure why the other (SEO person told me otherwise).
Ian Dixon: Way back when I first started making websites, I created a mini-CMS of my own because changing 20 pages for 1 single change to the header was hard work. It was only a DOS batch file that put together header+content+footer then gave me files to upload to the server but it served its purpose.
Essentially, I think most sites are built on a CMS these days +Rob Baker ;simply because they have to be due to the amount of content that they have. I have over 300 items on one site that are difficult enough to manage with CMS and would be impossible without one.
+W.E. Jonk ;I think Google sometimes does dislike CMS-based sites because they can produce very bloated code if badly done. That means slow load times and the googlebot is getting picky about that. Mine are far from perfect and need work to improve the speed which might well get me a boost in the Big G. Also, you mentioned Flash. That is something I try to avoid because it blocks you out of the Apple market
Rob Baker: +Ian Dixon ;You mentioned CMS's impact on page load speed. Do you have any thoughts on different types of CMS - in particular, we're looking at Joomla.
Ian Dixon: I would add Drupal as something to consider +Rob Baker ;although Joomla would also be a good choice.
The speed is more down to things that get added to the base CMS. For instance, adding in Google Analytics will slow page load time. Adding in social sharing buttons adds to load time. Remotely hosted ads do the same.
A site I find useful to check page speed is http://www.webpagetest.org/ which gives some horribly detailed figures about how a site performs. It shows very well areas to improve though.
Rob Baker: +Ian Dixon ;Ta... I guess one goes with what one's coder knows best, unless it's horrible, and our coder knows Joomla.
Ian Dixon: Sounds like a good enough reason to go with Joomla +Rob Baker ;
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Another reason you'll find people talking about staying away from CMS's is the viewpoint that CMS's don't allow the flexibility to modify the code for the best SEO. You'll often have to wait on the CMS to make the changes before you can receive the impact whereas with a self-built one, your internal organization can focus on what matters to your business rather than cater to multiple businesses that may not need/care about having the latest implementation of SEO on your site.
Rob Baker: +Micah Fisher-Kirshner ;Good point. ;I just got an update from my SEO friend, that he usually uses the CMS for most pages, but doesn't use it for those pages he wants to rank. ;
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Heh. Yeah, I've worked on both CMS's and non-CMS's and there are both ups and downs to both styles. The downside (which I didn't mention earlier) for not having a CMS is that you have to really push for internal buy-in to get something changed, but that means the Engineers have to like you too ;-)
W.E. Jonk: +Micah Fisher-Kirshner ;I don't really disagree, and it is more like an add-on.
If you buy a theme or a one time custom-made purchase for a particular CMS and you are clueless about the particular CMS it might be easier to get the HTML. However if you are serious you should try to get into a business relationship with the developer, normally they know the CMS ins/outs and thereby it would be much easier to publish/optimize your content and leave the dev parts to the developer. ;
In other words, you shouldn't worry about new things like a meta tag. In contrast if you want that, request that. That way you can focus on the things you know (content or building up the site). ;
So I fully agree that your "Engineers" should like you, and they should like you back. E.g. more business for you means more business for them ;-).
W.E. Jonk: +Ian Dixon ;you did mention that a CMS can produce "bloated code". I don't disagree with that. However it might be that the bloated code is coming from the (custom) theme or plugin. To me that doesn't mean the CMS is "bad". If you know the CMS you can fix it. Since you did mention some CMS, I like to mention Concrete5 because they have a nice API :D (but it is not perfect).
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: +W.E. Jonk: Doesn't matter if it's not the CMS's direct fault for the bloated code, people will bail just like people have bailed on Firefox for bloated plug-ins for Chrome. :)
W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:40:47 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/somebody_told_me_that_cms_systems_dont_do_as_well_as_sites_not_built_on_them
Somebody told me that CMS systems don`t do as well as sites not built on them. Any truth in that?? 
