WordPress Sucks: Impress Search Engines With These Alternatives

With the recent WordPress security vulnerabilities, hacked themes, exploits, and all sorts of madness floating around, it was only a matter of time before search engines started to pipe in and penalize “vulnerable” sites.

If your site is clean and clear, you have nothing to worry about, right? I don’t think so.

Considering that WordPress is so blatantly easy to install, configure, and get up and running, it has become the spammers choice for mass site deployment.

You only have to dig so deep to find services like LinkFarmEvolution and other mass WordPress posting services that offer to get your article “syndicated” to more than 5,000 websites instantly.

In essence, WordPress is a PC. Everyone uses it. With that, everyone is trying to exploit it for gain.

There are tons of other content management systems out there, the Mac’s of the CMS world if you will. Let’s start looking into some of them.

Note: You can fix most of these problems with WordPress by simply staying up to date, and, a variety of other methods which I will talk about at a later date.

For now, let’s talk about one reason why you should move to something other than WordPress: It isn’t WordPress and search engines will love your site moreso for not being WordPress.

Think about it: effort = reward. If you slapped together a website using a cheap theme and launch it on the web, do you really deserve to be ranked higher than someone who invested time and money into a designer, writing, and well structured thought out compliant code?

So here’s my short list of “CMS” or “blog” like systems that will get your website up and running almost as quickly as WordPress, without being WordPress.

• OctoPress: Sophisticated, made for hackers, and it has “press” in the name. What more do you want?
• Jekyll: OctoPress is based on Jekyll. You can even import your existing WordPress site into Jekyll using a script.
• Textpattern: Easy to use, very flexible, feels like WordPress.
• MovableType: Before WordPress there was Greymatter and MovableType.
• FeinCMS: Django based CMS.
• Notepad (or TextMate): Yes, it isn’t a system, but sometimes hand coding is simply the best way to go.

Jekyll is one of my favorites right now. If you have a skilled developer or are feeling somewhat experimental, you should give it a go.