During a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about what specific platform they should be using.
Their question is: does it matter to Google if their website is powered by WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, or any other service?
Many marketing agencies recommend using specific platforms because they help with SEO.
Is this true?
John said that this is absolutely not true. There is nothing in their systems, at least not that John is aware of, that would give any kind of preferred treatment to any specific platform.
With nearly all of these platforms, it’s possible to structure your pages however you want. And with that, Google will look at the website as they find it there, they will look at the content that is presented, and the way things are linked internally.
Then Google will process that like any HTML page. As far as John knows, their systems don’t even react to the underlying structure of the backend of a website and do anything special with that.
From John’s perspective, it may be that certain agencies have a lot of experience with one of these platforms, and they can help you make really good websites with that platform.
This is a perfectly legitimate reason to choose a platform and could be a good reason to say whether the agency will go with this platform or not.
But it’s not the case that any particular platform has an inherent SEO advantage.
This happens at approximately the 22:10 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Question)
Let me see. For Google, does it matter if our website is powered by WordPress, WooCommerce, or Shopify or any other service? A lot of marketing agencies suggest using specific platforms, because it helps with SEO, is that true?
John (Answer)
That’s absolutely not true. So there is absolutely nothing in our systems, at least as far as I’m aware of, that would give any kind of preferential treatment to any specific platform. And with pretty much all of these platforms, you can structure your pages, structure your website, however you want.
And with that, we will look at the website, as we find it there, we will look at the content that you present, the way the content is presented, the way things are linked internally. And we will process that, like any HTML page. As far as I know, our systems don’t even kind of react to the underlying structure of kind of like the backend of your website and do anything special with that.
So from that point of view, it might be that certain agencies have a lot of experience with one of these platforms. And they can help you to make really good websites with that platform, which is perfectly legitimate and could be a good reason to say like, I will go with this platform or not.
But it’s not the case that any particular platform has an inherent advantage, when it comes to SEO. You can, with pretty much all of these platforms, make reasonable websites, they can all be appearing well in search as well.
