Which CMS for Top Rated Products Site?

Hoping to get most of my traffic from search engines.

Will initially have a top rated product for each category, but want user interaction to choose another one if it arises.

I'm stuck between Joomla and Drupal, and suggestions?

Thanks!

 

Man go with drupal.
For SEO with Joomla you have to scratch your head. It few months back I was there scratching my head to.
But with drupal everything is under your control.

 

Drupal, when properly configured is VERY good for SEO.. And it's easy to 'set and forget' by adding a few modules like "path auto" and "meta tags" (path auto is probably the most important)..

Combine that with extensive cross-linking (easy with the "recent comment", or "recent page/topic" block feature, which may or may not be appropriate for your site) and you can easily have a high-ranking site for the keywords you choose.. Worked out very well for my site..

 

Joomla!

Easy to use. All the plugins and flexability you can imagine.

SEo is very easy as well contrary to what you hear.

Simply enable htaccess. and select a view options(by clicking a mouse) how hard is that?

 

I second Drupal, the sheer flexibility and power and ability to scale is amazing. The learning curve might be a tad steep but what you are able to create at the end is more than worth the time invested.

 

You guys keep saying that, but i did not experience this and found it very easy to learn!
Maybe because i knew zero about CMS's before i started and my mind was not 'poisoned' with pre-conceptions from using other systems..

 

Each Drupal and Joomla have advantages and disadvantages, but I do think the community behind Joomla is larger

 

Thanks for the great responses guys.

I'm still torn though, I really like the open source/community/ease of use of Joomla. But Drupal seems like it will be better for me in the long run if I want to make this site a consistent money maker. I wish the Drupal interface was better! I'm envisioning a 1000+ page site someday. With the main source of traffic from good ol' organic SEO.

One thing that worries me in Joomla is the limited hierarchy. I heard something about only allowing 2 levels?

For my top rated site I would need to have several levels in the sense that for example:

TV's --> Flat Panel TV's --> Plasma TV
Computers --> Hardware --> Graphics Card
etc...

So I don't know if Joomla will be able to handle that.....hmmmm...soooo torn!!!!!!!

 

My site has 15x that many pages.. and i get virtually all of my traffic from organic SEO ..

 

Drupal is extremely scaleable. And with the options of taxonomy, CCK and views, and the menu system in Drupal you'll have no issues whatsoever creating the kind of hierarchical navigation system you are thinking of. And with the Path and Pathauto modules you can set up your urls to look exactly how you want them to be so that each page you create automatically gets an SEO friendly correctly formatted url.

I think that once you get past whatever interface issues you're having, you'll find Drupal is a logical smart choice. What are your issues with the interface?

 

Big fan of Drupal as well. Site in my sig is a drupal powered site.

It's structured well, and there's an obvious place to plug in just about any kind of behavior you want.

It is a little heavyweight on shared hosting accounts though. I've tuned quite a bit just to get it running reasonably fast, but I should probably move to a VPS server.

If you need something smaller and lighter, and have some PHP skills, try MODx. I had some success with it, but ultimately went with Drupal because it did more out of the box.

 

Right now there's no good review or rating plugins for Drupal.

 

Huh? There's:

Fivestar module - http://drupal.org/project/fivestar
Node Vote - http://drupal.org/project/nodevote
Node Review - http://drupal.org/project/nodereview
Simple Review - http://drupal.org/project/simple_review

Implement these with CCK and Views and there's possibly no limit to what you can do.


One Drupal site using fivestar module:
http://www.adoptionagencyratings.com/

 

I have been using Joomla for a year now and after installing right components for SEO it is quite good. I see articles on my site indexed by google and people hit them directly from search engine results. It is also true that Joomla has a nice community so there are people to help you in case you need something.