Does using a CMS like Joomla harm your rankings?

Hi, i am fairly new to SEO and have been going through this great resource and have already found a great deal of useful information.

I however had one query which is related to my personal experience and i may well be wrong here, so please correct me if that is the case.

I have recently optimized 2 of our websites. 1 of these websites was built using joomla and the other one was created using a CMS that my development team wrote inhouse (we had used open source smarty for templates though). I had optimized both the websites in very similar fashion however they both are performing far differently. The non-joomla site got immediatly accepted in dmoz and is already getting decent amount of traffic from organic results considering the website is fairly new. The other one however was built using joomla and even though i have employed all modules available to make it as search engine friendly as possible, it gets about 1/10 the traffic as compared to the non-joomla website. And this joomla website has been in existence for almost 2 years now. Both sites are PR3 at the moment but importantly non-joomla site has barely 5-10 links to it as compared to a good 2500 links joomla site has.

So my question here is does using an open source program like joomla have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings?

Also does a plain html website has any advantage over a database driven website when it comes to SEO? I know this sounds a bit wierd and i believe it does not makes a difference but i would like to hear thoughts from you SEO pro's as i can only comment as a coder / programmer.

No, a dynamic site is not inherently any better or worse than a static site for SEO.

In order to compare whether or not the static site is better than the Joomla site, the two sites would have to be on the same topic, with similar content and similar structure. Any differences would completely negate direct comparison.

Thanks for the quick reply. But i have one other non-joomla site which is round about the same topic as the joomla site. non-joomla site cafecop dot com and joomla site xpcop dot com

Even the number of pages indexed in google are way way different. Non-joomla site has all the pages indexed and performs better on search engines. But i certainly believe and see no logic in this being a cause but i have seen funny things happening and looking for advice.

cafecop has 101 pages indexed v 69 for xpcop, so it's not really that big a difference -- maybe in percentage terms, but in absolute terms that's really nothing.

True, both sites deal with software, but they're still not close enough in the type of software as to be directly comparable.

I also notice that xpcop has a link on every page to cafecop (as well as other sites) unlike cafecop. Could this be helping cafecop and/or hindering xpcop?

I also notice that almost all links point to www.xpcop.com, whereas you have a redirect in place from that to xpcop.com -- could it be a factor, even with a 301 in place?

According to archive.org, cafecop is some 2.5 years older than xpcop. Could that be a factor?

Now, thats what i call "pro". I never knew that age could be a reason too. be a reason too. Thanks a whole lot for making me aware of this. One interesting comment you made was "I also notice that xpcop has a link on every page to cafecop (as well as other sites) unlike cafecop. Could this be helping cafecop and/or hindering xpcop?" Do you mean linking to a specific website could harm site with the link? how?

They both belong to some similar tags computer security, time management, user control although i certainly do agree that they are different softwares targetted towards different user base. Cafe Cop was infact a PR5 when xpcop site was created. Now dropped to PR3 though.

With Google's recent crack down on "paid for" links, I'd be cautious about linking to multiple sites as you are. Since they appear on every page, and since they're just a list of links with no additional text and not directly related to the topic of the site, they strike me as being ripe for picking off as designed purely to manipulate search rankings and PR.

It might not be an issue, but there's no way to tell just by looking at the site. You'd need to see if removing them and adding them back in makes a difference either way. But then who's to say that the act of removing them and adding them back in won't in itself be cause for adjusting other factors.

You surely have a very valid point, as it is even though all those links are basically our websites only but even then they are not related to each other and this surely would be going against xpcop. I do not see any special benefit of keeping them there either as per new google rules that i have come across on this forum. I will remove those links and see what difference does it makes. Thanks for your very useful advice.