Wordpress Custom Posts vs. Pages.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Heather Watts: Hi, I'm wondering if someone can answer a general question about Wordpress Custom Posts vs. Pages.  ;Does it matter which one you use from an SEO perspective?  ;
  
  I have a website with an art portfolio, each painting has a "page" and many pages also include a write-up.  ;I recently switched to a new theme which has a fantastic "portfolio" option I can use to display and organize everything, but it would mean I would have to switch all my existing page content over the custom posts.
  
  From an SEO standpoint, what should I do?  ;
  
  Thanks in advance to anyone that can offer insight!  ;  ;
• 
  Greg Baka: I don't use Wordpress, but from an SEO perspective it is the URL's that matter.
  
  - If the URL's for each painting's page do not change, then the SEO effect is zero (as long as you make sure the pages still have proper titles and metatags and such)
  
  - If the URL's do change, then you should 301 redirect the old URL's to the corresponding new URL's. (and remember to add proper titles and tags to the new pages)
• 
  Heather Watts: Thanks +gregbaka  ;that makes a lot of sense.  ;:-) I think I can configure the URLs the same way.  ;I'm still curious to hear a perspective from someone who's on wordpress too just in case wordpress does anything odd (SEO-wise) with custom post types that I'm not aware of.  ;I haven't worked with them before.  ;
• 
  Heather Watts: +Greg Baka ;lol I missed the "read more" link and just saw your first sentence before. Caught the full comment in my email.  ;That extra detail helps.  ;By the way, I've been looking into it and trying to figure it out, do you happen to know how 301 re-directs affect SEO?  ;Do they just affect (very slightly) the "juice" from the old links, or do they actually affect the new page the re-direct is for?
• 
  Justin Murray: Use something like https://wordpress.org/plugins/quick-pagepost-redirect-plugin/ to easily create 301 redirects.  ;They transfer the juice from the old link (or at least most of it) if done properly, which in turn affects the new page that is the destination for the redirect.
• 
  Heather Watts: +Justin Murray ;Thanks, that's helpful.  ;I'll give it a look. :-)
• 
  Tony McCreath: With pages and posts the main difference is how the content gets integrated into the website. How it is linked in.
  
  Posts are a time dependent concept where older posts fade away. With respect to links they start off high profile with thens from the home page then eventually end up linked from an old archive page. So Posts are designed for blogging where the content gets treated as less relevant over time.
  
  Pages on the other hand are evergreen. They are linked to from menus. These links don't disappear or fade out over time. Pages are for content that will be just as important next year as it is today.
  
  SEO wise. Posts are good for content that is relevant now but less relevant later. Like blogs or news items. Pages are for content that is long term. Like contact details, services and about us pages.
  
  To your example. It all depends on how you connect up these custom posts. Will they be part of a permanent gallery structure and therefore behave more like pages?
• 
  Heather Watts: +TonyMcCreath Wow!  ;Thank you so much.  ;This is exactly the kind of information I'm looking for.  ;Exactly as you said, the custom posts will be connected up as part of a permanent gallery structure and therefore behave more like pages.  ;The main portfolio page will be permanently linked to in the main site top bar navigation menu, so based on what you said it seems to me that using custom posts rather than pages should be fine in this case because I will be using a linking structure similar to what I would with pages.  ;
  
  I would leave them as pages, but my theme has a great portfolio system & portfolio item custom post that will allow for navigating through my art relatively easily with back/next links, ability to filter thumbnails by section etc, where otherwise I would have had to manually create a main gallery page with thumbnails, then each subsection page with thumbnails, figure out all the back/next links, etc.
  
  Could you confirm I'm on the right track with my thinking, and that provided I maintain my link structure and good URLs with ;proper 301 re-directs if I change any of them I should be good to go to migrate my page content to custom posts with no adverse effect on SEO.  ;(I actually wonder if there may be a benefit because of the back/next linking and navigation linking that will now be available on each post.)  ;
• 
  Tony McCreath: +Heather Watts ;It all sounds good from here. ;
• 
  Heather Watts: +Tony McCreath ;Thanks a MILLION!  ;I really really appreciate your detailed answer.  ;:-)  ;
• 
  Richard Hearne: Any actual difference depends entirely on what you do. There's actual no difference from an SEO perspective all other things held equal.
  
  The overall architecture of your site and velocity of updates could introduce large differences between posts and pages, but equally may make no difference at all.
  
  I think if you offer a usage case you can get better responses to your initial question.
• 
  Heather Watts: Thanks +Richard Hearne ;That makes sense too.  ;In one of my comments I was more specific: "the custom posts will be connected up as part of a permanent gallery structure and therefore behave more like pages.  ;The main portfolio page will be permanently linked to in the main site top bar navigation menu, so based on what you said it seems to me that using
  custom posts rather than pages should be fine in this case because I will be using a linking structure similar to what I would with pages."  ;(actually the linking structure will be identical)  ;So there will be no changes from the user side / content side.  ;However, I'm not sure how/if the "architecture" will change on posts vs. pages.  ;I guess I don't know exactly what site "architecture" means, and whether it's something I can control, or is theme-specific, or is determined by wordpress?  ;I assume it has something to do with how everything will look on my xml sitemap?
• 
  Richard Hearne: >> ;whether it's something I can control, or is theme-specific, or is determined by wordpress?
  
  All 3 or any combination.  ;The architecture is based on how pages are interlinked within your site - think of it like a pyramid with your homepage generally at the very top.
  
  One question - if this is a gallery to you expect to keep adding new images?  ;This is where things get trickier with older galleries moving further and further down the architecture.
• 
  Heather Watts: +Richard Hearne ;Thank you very much for clarifying how the architecture works. My theme is apparently really SEO-savvy (Dante Theme) so presumably they've taken this into account.  ;As to your other point, I'd definitely be adding new images over time but not a huge amount.  ;Like 10-50 per year is my guess.  ;And maybe the same amount of posts (not custom post-types) added in a year.  ;Do you know if you can back-date a custom post?  ;For example, if later I wanted to add an archive section of older images, could I backdate those posts to be less relevant on purpose?  ; ; ;
• 
  Richard Hearne: From the sounds of it your site is going to be very small so you shouldn't need to worry at all about architecture.  ;As to back-dating - WordPress allows you to set any publish date you wish AFAIK.
  
  I frequently work with multi-million page sites, so I'm always thinking about architecture.  ;Unwarranted in this case :)
• 
  Heather Watts: +Richard Hearne ;haha, okay, wow, Yeah, there are such different considerations on such a huge site I'm sure because things could just get buried forever if they're in the wrong place.  ;Thanks a bunch for your help!  ;I really appreciate your thoughtful input and I'm looking forward to starting to use custom post types for my little site. :-)