PageRank Update – Does Google Love Movable Type More Than WordPress?

I woke up this morning surprised to see a PageRank 4 on this blog. I noted that we were due for a PageRank (PR) update as we haven’t had one since about April and PR generally updates every quarter. I went through some of the sub-pages of Entrepreneur’s Journey to see which had gained PR. I was disappointed to see only the index (PR4) and the category pages (PR3) gained PR, with the individual entries having no ranking at all.

I am curious how Google treats this blog, which runs off the WordPress (WP) blogging software. WP generates pages from a database on the fly, it’s dynamic, written in the PHP language. One of my original concerns about switching my old blog, which was running the Movable Type (MT) blogging system, was how Google would treat the new blog using WP. I had been comforted by people that knew WP well that it was just as likely to be indexed by Google as Movable Type. In fact it was better because it allowed me to specify the name of each page (pageslug) while MT took a truncation of the article title.

After reviewing this blog I then browsed around to view all my other sites and see whether PR had changed. I was surprised to see that Yaz! had jumped to a PageRank 4 and wondered how that could be given that I have basically left that site to look after itself and besides the activity in the forums the site had not been updated in a long time. Lastly I went to my old blog hosted on BetterEdit.com and was surprised (and happy) to see that it had jumped to a PR5, the highest ranking I have managed to achieve on a site. Again I had no idea how this could have happened since I had not updated the old blog since I moved it to Entrepreneurs-Journey.com in June. However this did account for the Yaz! ranking jump since the old blog with a PR5 has a few links to Yaz! so it’s likely that resulted in the jump to PR4. In fact I’d say that’s also the reason this blog has a PR4 since it has a direct link from the old blog.

Ever since I started my old blog using MT I was amazed at how quickly Google just ate it up. MT pages are static, it creates a flat html page for each entry and they quickly gained PR and are well indexed within Google. Of course my old blog had an advantage as it was hosted on a domain (BetterEdit.com) that already had a PR4.

I’m not going to pass judgement on WP just yet as it is too early since Entrepreneur’s Journey has only been online for a month or two. The usability and functionality of WP is also superior to MT so judging purely on PageRank is not really fair anyway. I would hope in the long term that this blog will become better indexed within Google and the other search engines and will be rewarded with more free SERP traffic coming through.

I’ve started to give less importance to PageRank. I still chase high rankings and I certainly know PR plays an important role in any SEO campaign, however I’m now more inclined to look at the real statistics that count. In the case of this blog numbers like RSS feed subscribers, podcast downloads and raw traffic numbers really matter. Of course high PR with optimised keywords should improve those statistics but at the moment I’m worrying about good content and will let everything else develop naturally over time.