The WordPress Collective
WordPress is being marketed as a FREE online package for novices who would like to run a blog.
WordPress Will Assimilate Your Blog
What the decision to use WordPress actually is, is the decision to join a cult or the collective known as WordPress. Using WordPress means that WordPress fully intends to assimulate your blog into their collective. WordPress is intent upon syndicating all of your original content in the form of feeds, pingbacks, trackbacks, and so on; all over the globe.
Furthermore, the cult of WordPress bloggers are committing themselves to use jargon, like blogrolls and post slugs, that is meaningful only to your other fellow bloggers.
I always was of the opinion that slugs were snails.
Silly me.
Matt Cutts, one of the most well known googlers, can blog about next to nothing and still get zillons of hits and links to his blog. While Joe Schmore, a total unknown, could write nearly identical posts and be totally ignored.
The average person running a blog needs to decide early on if they primarily want to be part of the WordPress Culture or a part of Google‘s Web Search Engine Revolution. Since success in both for most of us is mutually exclusive. You should seriously be asking yourself, if you are so happy being a part of the WordPress culture then why do you even want to rank well in Google, anyhow?
The Culture of WordPress Blogs
WordPress has built-in ways to attract traffic to their blogs. Yes, just like the Star Trek’s Borg, WordPress views your blog more theirs than your own. A Feed is a function of special software that allows feedreaders to access a blog automatically looking for new content, and posting updates when that content is updated. Pingbacks, or trackbacks, are how bloggers inform the original author whenever they cite their article in another blog. These syndication features are designed to tie your blog to the WordPress collective.
From the point-of-view of webmasters, is this so-called traffic more illusionary than real? Great, now hundreds of computers are subscribing to your blog so that they can instantly be notified of changes. WordPress does a good job of making naive bloggers believe that syndication is an effective way to bring traffic to their blog. But is this traffic really any different from a regular Web site being crawled by search engine bots? And, how can people not actually visiting your blog be considered traffic? If visitation is not really important to you, then why all this fuss over choice of theme and plugins? Why even bother hosting your blog? Why not just feed the feeder with your new posts?
Recently WordPress has come up the idea called tags. A tag is an unadvertised method of connecting each one of your published posts to the posts written by zillions of other bloggers. Somehow, the WordPress collective is presumed, but is hardly ever, writing on the same topic.
The Google Revolution
You have taken great pains to scrupulously eliminate all duplicate content from your blog, only to find out that WordPress itself is sending your original content all over the globe by allowing anonymous people to subscribe to a feed to your blog’s content.
Tell me, does that make any more sense to you, then it does to me? While most people wont scrap your original content, you are nevertheless giving every unscrupulous person on the planet the opportunity to do so. Why would any rational person want their own original posts duplicated verbatim on another blog?
I view WordPress more as a FREE content management system (CMS) than as a blog. I really don’t want a loyal flock of subscribers to my blog. Why? Because consistently writing any type of newsletter, or a blog, takes a tremendous amount of time which I simply do not have to give. What I want is for people with a real life being able to find what I have written in the Google search engine. In other words, if what I write about matches the information that real people are searching for, then I want them to be able to find my blog. Whether or not they ever return to my blog, I really do not care.
If that matches what you are interested in, then I would suggest that you disable WordPress’ feed feature and consider yourself a part of the Google revolution.
