Validity of Wordpress 'SEOs'?

Question

Simple question: Am I wrong in reccomending against Wordpress SEOs?

Now, I don't want to start a flame war or anything like that, but I'm just curious if my viewpoint is consistent with other developers / hosts out there. I work at a small company, and we specialize in Microsoft-based hosting and CMS solutions, particularly a popular open-source CMS system that runs on ASP.NET.

However, I've recently seen a significant jump in the amount of my clients who are being approached by SEO companies that are promising them the world on SERPs rankings. The catch is that these "SEO Experts" are all requiring that the sites have Wordpress installed on our servers so they can 'work their magic'.

To add insult to injury, many of these approached sites I have constantly made SEO recommendations to along 'white-hat' SEO lines - quality, keyword-rich, content that is updated frequently along with a good network of inbound links and semantic markup. In comparison, sites that follow our design and content recommendations (regardless of back-end technology) are ranking in the top 5-10 organically based upon targeted search phrases. However, it seems there is a significant increase in these "Wordpress SEOs" recently.

Now, I'm not trying to slam PHP or Wordpress (at least not intentionally), however to me I am a bit hesitant to allow some third parties access to my servers when there have been several PHP / Wordpress vulnerabilities recently and I just don't trust these fly-by-nighters. The common theme I've seen is that they will install one version, and be done with it, regardless of released updates to address vulnerabilities. I also am still of the opinion that while PHP can be secure when implemented correctly, there are more PHP 'developers' that write very sloppy code and leave holes open because they don't know any better - I had one that enabled Global Variables somehow, which nearly took down an entire server when their site was exploited.

So, am I being overly paranoid about this? I hate telling my customers 'no' but it seems to put a lot more work on our end to keep up with all of our current issues, and then have to also monitor any Wordpress / PHP issues that may crop up as well. I also am not a fan of maintaining or having to update Wordpress installs for someone else.

To me, it seems that many of these "Wordpress SEOs" are just people who are only familiar with Wordpress, and refuse to use any other system. I always get this picture in my head of someone who read a "Get rich on the Internet being an SEO" book and this is the result. However, I am open to any opinions / discussion as to why Wordpress may be superior for SEO placement - aside from it's easy for idiots, which I already know.

Am I being unreasonable here, or is this a reasonable concern?

Answer 1

They sound like scammers. And if they're not scammers, they sound just like you categorize them - "only familiar with Wordpress, and refuse to use any other system".

Answer 2

Good question. In my opinion, there's only so much you can do to optimize for search. Filling your HTML with meta crap won't matter since everyone else is doing it. In the end, all search engines really care about is who and how many link to your site.

Answer 3

Google has even commented on these shady practices of "SEO" companies:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.

They don't single out Wordpress only "leeches" but... I think is an industry wide issue. I would have to agree with others, " we only can work on Wordpress " raises some serious questions.

You really need to do your due diligence and read the contract before signing with SEO companies, that is the bottom line.

Answer 4

You're spot on in your worries and many of your preconceptions. SEO websites like Sphinn.com and seomoz.org are full of slick people who make the concept of blogging purely for marketing sound easy and accessible, to those with the time. There's plenty of walkthroughs out there that can make even the most amateur marketing person an SEO Wordpress extraordinaire.

The truth is, if your site doesn't need a blog, you shouldn't get one. Just filling it with keyword-directed links to other pages on your site is the antithesis of the 'content is king' mentality among the more scrupulous SEO experts. If someone from the SEO industry is offering to set up Wordpress for you, especially an independent contractor or a small agency, I would suggest you politely refuse, and maybe request they not contact you for anything in the future.

I have firsthand experience with the kinds of development teams at small SEO firms that oversee the implementation of superfluous Wordpress blogs, and the risk just doesn't outweigh the benefit. You not only risk your company's reputation with Google and with your clients as abject spammers if the content isn't good, but you also risk the entire security of your web platform. New security bugs in Wordpress come out rather regularly, and they're the kind that can damage your reputation and your website at large. In my opinion, it seems like the platform itself just isn't worth the hassle of dealing with for any real business use. Leaving it to an agency or contractor generally means risking not being their top priority when a big security patch comes out. That's the most dangerous time not to have the updated version.

If having a blog is worth it to you, I suggest hiring an at least semi-literate programmer who can both maintain the blog platform and write it. Having a passing understanding of how SEO works can help a bit, but there are deeper benefits from providing useful blog content. Implementing a 'blog' part of a website is easy enough that any competent programmer can roll their own -- so much so, it's often part of the interview process for web development positions. Starting from scratch means that they can do it in a fashion which jives more with your own security policies. You can also specify your own features and general look-and-feel in a much easier way. Not having to filter an editor's writing through a WYSIWYG editor is nice, too.

Answer 5

I would recommend against these 'SEO experts'. While there is a chance they could increase your clients' ranking, I believe there is a higher chance that they will get lower ranked or even delisted if it's anything like the 'optimizations' I've seen before.

They probably want WP installed so they can add links to their other clients sites from your server. They would in turn link to your clients site from one of their other WP blogs creating a little SEO network for themselves. This would give them free hosting across a variety of IPs and domains. Of course WP is not specifically required for this, probably just what some free e-book told them to use as you suspect.