There are so many possible places to start in supporting Michael Krotscheck’s statements and pointing out Six Apart VP Anil Dash mistakes. Here is an easy one:
And TypePad simply blows WordPress.com away on SEO when it comes to search engine indexing. TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.
Are there specific issues that WordPress needs to fix to reverse the blow (hard)?
Anil, do you have any data to support the wild claim that TypePad has better SEO than WordPress.com? Of course you don’t. Further, I don’t understand what the 2nd sentence means (link with additional info?) or how it even relates to SEO.
WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (once you enable permalinks) share the same great SEO, and WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO of any web publishing platform out there. We are very fortunate for having numerous SEO experts that have long participated in WordPress development including SEO luminaries like Google’s Matt Cutts.
Here are a couple of the most obvious issues TypePad could fix to get on the path to WordPress levels of SEO:
1. For years TypePad’s URLs of posts (permalinks) had underscores between_words, which still are not well supported by search engines1. In the last couple of years2 thankfully they now default to using-hyphens for new posts which allows search engines to recognize the individual words.
Unfortunately, TypePad still only includes fifteen characters from the title in the URL. Anil’s example http://www.celebrity-babies.com/2008/06/scott-and-renee.html3 didn’t show this, but it often results in words being cut off in the mid.
Lets look at the articles of one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Seth Godin. What would you or a search engine think is going to be the title of the post with the URL of http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/the-marketing-o.html . No, it isn’t “The Marketing O’”, it’s “The Marketing of Fear”. If you look at his other articles must suffer from this same problem.
If you want TypePad URL SEO you have to limit your titles to a couple of words?!
2. TypePad sets an article’s URL when a draft is first made and doesn’t update it when the title is updated. This one is the far more annoying and potentially embarrassing if the original title was inappropriate.
Lets look at the posts of another one of my favorite bloggers who I know to be on TypePad, Steve Rubel. Just looking at his posts on the front page, I only have to look to the 2nd post from the top to see an example of this problem. The title is “Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing”, but the URL is http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/06/how-friendfeed.html. How? That must have been how the beginning of his original draft read.
Where I see this issue the most is blogs with editors. Look for it the next time you are reading a Wired blog. I’m sorry now that I’ve pointed it out, you likely won’t be able to help but notice, and it will start to bug you too as much as it bothers me 
Six Apart is well aware of both issues, and knows the SEO implications. For the second issue, I emailed Anil about this over six months ago, because it bugs me that much.
On the other hand, not only does WordPress not have either of these problems, if you change the URL after publishing, the old URL will continue to work and forward to the new URL.
I’ve done a few exports from TypePad, one of the most recent being Health.com’s blog. One of the things I did was review the existing search engine optimization and I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find scrapper sites some times show up above the blog in search results. My guess is these two issues at least play a part in this happening.
These type of issues are in the most basic examples of SEO. Worse, it’s just a lousy experience — I like to think the first rule of SEO is that the optimization is also a good user experience, or at the very least doesn’t detract from the experience. Come on Six Apart fix these issues. It’s better for everyone.
Really? Wow. I didn’t know that. With a 301 redirect? That’s pretty cool. One more point for WordPress.
“WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO” — I think it would be better to say something like “recognized as having *one of* the best SEO”
.html (and really ALL such endings) should go away. It means that it makes it harder to switch platforms / technologies, and the endings add no semantic or SEO value.
But yeah, Anil’s comments seem pretty harsh…the old “open source is insecure” meme was particularly painful to watch…we recently had to counter that with an EE vs. Drupal security model write up: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-and-expressionengine-security-models
Boris, you are quite right. I’ve never seen a significant complaint against Drupal’s SEO either.
I’ll save the security topic for its own post
Ian, yeah, it’s some of Mark “Canonical” Jaquith’s fine work.
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As someone who obviously cares about URL design (http://blog.welldesignedurls.org), I was one who ranted constantly to TypePad’s support department while I had several blogs on TypePad all to no avail. I can tell you trying to get TypePad to do the things I needed it to do was nothing short of an effort in pure futility.
Fortunately last year I sold the blog that was my primarily hosted TypePad blog (http://thoughtsonsalesforce.com). I just relaunched my personal blog this past weekend on WordPress after a year of no blogging because of another poorly chosen blogging platform; the .NET-based dasBlog. And considering both TypePad and dasBlog I can tell you since moving to WordPress I have experienced (by comparison) nothing but bliss.
I could write a whole chapter on why, but at this point I don’t care enough to do so. Adiós Six Apart.
BTW, GREAT find about the URLs on the Wired blog. Yeah, they *really* do suck.
Thats to bad. I think a lot of people just choose whatever looks best and try and get it up. Then they find out there is a big difference in how they work.
Another round of WP bashing TP…Anyway, after being on both TP and WP for a year now I still cannot find a good reason to switch to WP. Not for what I want/need to do with my blog. So it really comes down to personal preference and reasons for blogging. My reasons match what TP has to offer, not WP.
Hi Jan, I’m sorry you feel that I’m bashing TP. These are actually factual, very serious SEO issues. How is that bashing?
The article that you link to in your name “Why blog on Typepad?” is very good. Some of the issues you mention have since been addressed, but you are correct WordPress.com doesn’t currently allow advertising, and it seems that is the most important part of your article.
Lloyd,
Actually, advertising is not the main reason for me to be with TP rather than WP. Mainly it’s the editor/composer and the dashboard/GUI at WP which to me lacks the structure and clarity of TP. I feel much happier working on TP than on WP, and that’s reason enough for me to chose TP over WP.
OK Jan, with 2 TypePad affiliate links, 2 TP adverts and other ads, it is clear that advertising and affiliate programs are important to you, as they are to me. And in the context WordPress.com isn’t a good choice.
Many of the other issues you mention we have tried to address. It would be wonderful to know what you think of the WordPress changes since your previous review.
I’m also still interested in what about my article is TP bashing?
Another point, TypePad 404’s out if the URL is incomplete or even missing a trailing slash , while on WordPress they can map you to the closest match on a particular URL. In other words, even links that have been cut off because they’re too long are 301 redirected to the correct ones.
Well, Lloyd, I have to admit this, upon scrutinizing this post an its comments back and forth, the use of the word “bashing” is not warranted here. I stand corrected. Sorry. And as to re-reviewing WP, I do plan to do a side-by-side with screenshots comparison of WP and TP and why I think TP is better. I just haven’t had the time yet.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to read an article claiming that X ‘blows’ as bashing X. Or does it mean something different in Canada?
Interesting that you’re not dangling the carrot of a future adsense upgrade on wordpress.com; can we take it that this idea has been shelved, and that the FAQ will be updated to reflect this?
that girl again,
Fair enough, the title is a cheaky twist of “And TypePad simply blows…”, but I don’t think a title makes the whole article bashing.
I hope I’m not a carrot dangler.
I’m not involved in the adsense project. It seems to still regularly be discussed by the team.
I have a WP blog and also a TP blog and in the words of the professor, they both seem to “blow” if you ask me. But what do I know, I’m just an average person who has no preference. All I want is a blog with good URLs AND that is safe from being hacked all the time like it was outlook 98 or something. Not sure what to do now but will keep fiddling with both and muddle along, woo hoo.
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Regarding underscores vs. dashes. Yes, dashes are a preferred word separator as they may be part of a domain or its path and therefore are best understood by search engines and other tools trying to tokenize a URL beyond common path separators such as a forward slash. Search engine treatment has varied over the years and of course each search engine is different. In 2005 Matt Cutts blogged about dashes in URLs connecting separate words. In a speech at WordCamp SF 2007 Matt again suggested dashes are better than underscores for URL meaning. In a Webmaster Central chat last week the team at Google indicated +, -, and _ are valid delimiters. Looks like all blogging platforms are preferring dashes in their current releases, so a moot point about how to improve, or which one is best.
“TypePad delivers your blog posts directly to Google Reader and My Yahoo and Blogline.” Anil is likely referring to a direct XML-RPC ping from the TypePad servers to Google, Yahoo, and Bloglines ping beacons on behalf of the blogger. WordPress routes such pings through Ping-o-Matic which acts as a proxy for all interested ping beacons. The availability and reliability of Ping-o-Matic to successfully relay ping requests on behalf of WordPress authors could be a SEO issue. The Ping-o-Matic site currently does not list Google Reader or Bloglines as supported ping beacons.
Regarding slugs, their length, and their generation. WordPress, TypePad, and other systems automatically generate a unique identifier for each post called a slug in the publishing industry. It’s a big SEO benefit to reference “typepad-blows” than post 16. Authors can override the automatically generated slug on each blog platform for more targeted SEO benefit. The length of the slug on each system may vary, such as allowing 16, 32, or 64 characters of expression. The UI of one blog platform or the other might highlight the slug, or encourage the author to override the automatically generated information. Expanding the number of characters in a slug and filtering out filler words such as “of” or “and” should help improve blog SEO all around.
How might WordPress templates affect SEO? Many templates attribute template designers in the footer. WordPress used to automatically insert links to lead developers such as Matt or Ryan. PageRank algorithms, in simple terms, distribute the weight of the page evenly among all of those links and links to Matt, Ryan, or template sponsors can dilute the SEO weight of links in a post or blog header.
HTML markup varies between WordPress templates while TypePad templates are based on the Six Apart standard markup used across TypePad and Movable Type defaults. It’s possible some templates in the WordPress system are chosen for their looks and not for their markup and the SEO effectiveness can vary by template.
@Eligio that is a great point!
Since version 2.3 (Sept 2007), WordPress has found an article if only a partial URL is provided. At first you may think this isn’t very interesting, but consider how many emails you have received where the line breaks in the middle of a URL.
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Well it’s quite easy to see who’s the best by exploring the Google search results. Majority of middleweight to top SEO experts are using either WordPress or a custom built blog soft. Anyone on Typepad? Almost none.
I agree with your point that WP is one of the best, however, if one fails to arrange your robots file the proper way, he might hit himself in the head with the duplicate content problem.
Matt Cutts himself lately reinstated that the ‘_’ is not yet regarded as a separator but it could be in the near future. Anyway always safer to use the ‘-’.
Curiously enough, the right answer to the question about whether Typepad or Wordpress is better for SEO is both are very good.
While the 15 character post limit is extremely annoying, limiting posts to 31 characters is actually a way to show a little respect to Google and the rest by not having long really spammy urls. Shorter URLs have been a help at various points on various search engines.
Typepad IP addresses are very clean (paying customers only) and get a special Google boost (we move lots of sites from Typepad to Wordpress keeping permalinks intact and if the weblog moves onto a dirty IP just watch the rankings tumble). We try to insist our clients move to clean IP blocks and dedicated IPs but some of them have made other arrangements and can’t be persuaded.
On the other hand, Wordpress lets you do exactly as you want. We’ve added a javascript to our client sites which cuts off their slugs at 31 characters forcing them to create reasonable URL slugs.
Wordpress lets you add a plugin or two which turn excerpts into descriptions which again we limit at 155 characters via javascript in compliance with Google guidelines.
Wordpress SEO requires a bit of work, but done right on a clean dedicated IP is the best in the world. SEO though is not the area I would say Typepad falls down (at least until version two where they turned image names into numbers and cut the extension off causing display issues in at least Safari).
Addressing Jan’s point about the editor in Wordpress – I don’t like the editor/TinyMCE either (although the latest one is better). But guess what in Wordpress we were able to write a better Wordpress WYSIWYG editor (subjective of course) and include all the image SEO and management routines we wanted and which doesn’t break javascript. Try installing your own editor in Typepad or getting anything except numbered images in your posts.
I agree with Alec, he knows what he is talking about when it comes to Typepad SEO, because he brings up some issues about permalinks and general flexibility issues. Well written.
I am a big fan of Wordpress and try to get my friends to switch.
The news is Sixapart makes a nice little guide on how to switch.
http://help.sixapart.com/tp/us/typepad_to_wordpress.html
That combined with a Wordpress redirection (I use Platinum SEO pack plugin) makes it a very easy process.
I also tell my friends to upgrade to Typepad premium before they switch because it is the only way you can do a redirect if you do not own your own domain name.
Over all I agree with the above Wordpress is the CMS of choice and moving to it from Typepad is very easy.