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Content Management Systems (CMS) are a blessing and a nightmare in one stride. Of course, it’s fairly easy to get the “blessing” bit because if in doubt, the friendly company sales rep will do her very best to point them out to you in all their glory: managing large web sites with thousands of pages and different sections (think static sites, blogs, press releases, videos, support knowledgebases, corporate financials, shopping carts, pricing etc.) can only be built, maintained and updated efficiently and economically with a powerful CMS that provides you with a central admin section to configure even the most minute details. Thus, they will (or at least: are supposed to) help you save inordinate amounts of time and costly human labor.

So much for the chocolate side of things. Something you won’t find being discussed at greater length, though, is the “nightmare” aspect. Unfortunately, when scrutinized from an SEO’s point of view, it’s also the predominant one.

Over at the  Sebastian’s Pamphlets blog, SebastianX features a mighty fine piece of precise geeky analysis addressing a long-held pet peeve of ours: “Dump your self-banning CMS” (Note: Features some strong language, in case you mind that kind of thing…)

Image via Wikipedia

Here are some of his highlights (but do make sure to read the entire article – you may be losing money by the ton without even realizing it!):

• User interfaces are generally confusing and low on usability
• Database design is amateurish, badly scalable and a performance downer
• Cookie management is almost non-existent and badly aligned with lean CSS requirements
• Query strings are less than economical, creating lots of entirely unnecessary overhead
• Rigid variable handling, ignoring user specs
• Spider detection and handling are a bad joke and highly unreliable (leading to skewed traffic stats)
• Bloated code rules

What all of this (and more) adds up to is a site the search engine spiders will soon learn to hate – making for lousy rankings, inadvertent penalization, awful turnover, frustrated webmasters, stultified SEOs, exploding PPC costs and ornery investors.

The trickiest part about this sorry state of affairs is that you’re generally totally unable to pin down the real issues at hand. Even geeks will have a hard time doing this, e.g. in positively discerning why a given site’s rankings are crashing through the floor because there’s so many different variables involved that it’s really anybody’s guess.

Nor is this mere theory: as our fantomaster linkImprover™ service case studies show (you can sign up here to get them for free), just about every site analysis run we conduct tends to detect tons and tons of orphaned pages, not to mention all those sub-optimal on site links that can effectively kill your rankings without your even being aware of it. In 99 out of 100 cases this is due to badly configured and/or coded content management systems!

So if you have deployed a CMS (or are planning to do so in future) make sure you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, it could easily amount to an act of suicidal SEO…

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