In favor of Wordpress, I agree there are SEO benefits, which is why I probably won’t quit WP cold turkey. Even if I find a better alternative (Twitter API, custom code, affiliate program?) my WP blogs provide a nice little stream of income.
I’ve considered coding my own comment system to end my WordPress prison sentence, but building comparable RSS feeds from scratch is actually really boring. One day I started to map out the XML of a basic RSS feed and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Of course back then RSS feeds were all the rage, so it makes sense someone invested time in a “comments” feed. These days RSS is not such a big deal, but you got to figure the SEs still know what to do with that data. I’ll go out on a limb and say “comments RSS” is SEO-significant. Posts with lots of comments seem to get lots of traffic from SEs. It’s a strong signal, you can’t deny it.
I also figure Google knows what WordPress is and to a degree respects the various header info that’s baked into WP–there is some safety in numbers there. WP’s strong reputation comes from investing years of time with no expectation of success. Before Automattic pulled the New York Times, how did they make money? Hats off to Matt for the trailblazing. Was Matt into SEO back in the day? I don’t know. I seem to remember the WP forums were accused of selling links, or something like that–just rumors?
I wish I could just extract the RSS functions from WP, but so far I haven’t found a way to do that. Going forward, microblogging seems the logical RSS replacement, but we still have a way to go there. Identi.ca is promising and I’m starting to play with it more, but I think it might be a few years more before we can safely sweep RSS under the rug with all the other forgotten standards. Status.net seems too focused on small enterprise networks. Who wants to take on Twitter at this point, who could afford the bandwidth? At some point we’re going to see a real “open source” Twitter challenger, but we’re not there yet.
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