Do content management systems cause problems for search engines when ranking a site or are they just as effective as normal websites. We are looking at going over to a CMS as we have a contract that the clients want online access to documents/reports and billing so we we thought that a simple CMS would give the basic functionality with reasonable security without having to go to all the effort of custom software.

Depends on the CMS Colin, Mambo isn't too bad but have a look at Sub-Dreamer also.

Which CMS were you considering.?

joomla

One of the car rallys that I go to use it for their site Tour of Mull 2006 I like the clean lines of the site.

If you use IE you could try the google toolbar which has a page ranking meter in it, also you could type in google site:http://www.nameofsiteusingcms.co.uk

Google never used to index dynamic pages with ?id= in the url, or similar. Like forums don't get listed on search engines much.

What you are better off doing, rather than changing your site, is just add a section to it for members/customers, so they put a password and username in and then they can access the manuals, invoices etc.

The cms i was looking at is Joomla and this site also uses it Tour of Mull website and it has a page rank of 4. So i assume google is visiting them.

The actual Joomla website is VERY well ranked with a PR8.

Perhaps search engines have changed the way they do things.

Actually my page rank mention is misguided, page rank will appear on all pages that google finds for the site, but that doesn't mean to say it will index a page for a valid search because it has a page ranking.

Put into google site:http://www.2300club.org/

Results 1 - 10 of about 1,320 from www.2300club.org for . (0.15 seconds)

Scroll to the bottom of the results and click the last results page which should be page 17

Results 161 - 170 of about 1,320 from www.2300club.org for . (0.81 seconds)

Scroll to the bottom of that page and notice;

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 170 already displayed.

If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

So basically, all those pages with a dynamic url index.php?option=com_classifieds&Itemid=

is actually not used by google in the search results.

I am not 100% sure that a page like that wouldn't ever be listed in a search result, but if it did it would be for a realy obscure key word only. But it is likely to be ignored.

CMS Ratings

A very good reference or all things CMS related.