SEO impact of native vs. custom blog post types in WordPress

Question

When I was setting up my Wordpress based site, the native blog post type (posts) didn't offer the structure and features I was after, so I created my own custom post type (library) with additional taxonomies and tags for publishing articles.

I now have lots of active and indexed articles of the custom post type, but none of the blog type. As a result I'm getting notifications from Yoast saying, "you have not yet published a post. Publish your first post".

My question is: does it matter for SEO if I use the native blog post type or custom post type for publishing articles?

Answer 1

In short, no, it doesn't matter. It sounds like Yoast doesn't recognise your custom taxonomy, so it "thinks" you haven't published any blog content at all.

Of course, the way your custom pages are built (HTML structure, UX design, assets loaded, etc.) will affect their SEO performance — that's a different question.

Yoast is a good tool for simplifying a lot of common SEO tasks (templating titles and meta descriptions, XML Sitemaps, etc.), but in my opinion its measures of optimisation quality are far too reductive to be useful.

Answer 2

There are three content types in Wordpress:

• Default posts. Those are content type, about Yoast notifies you, create your first post...
• Custom posting types. Those are content type, which are created with help of different content creation kits. The difference to the first type: they are saved in another database tables, as default posts, and can include another pieces of content, like forms, images, attachments, custom taxonomies - everthing as you created them.
• Pages. Those are plain html pages. If your posts are simple - title, text, image, video, and doesn't need any bells and whistles, you definitely should drive with content type pages. Because they are ways faster loaded, than all of another content types, mainly because they need much less database queries and code execution. The main bottleneck of any Wordpress is always and everywhere the performance. If you create pages, you'll never be affected by this disgusting headache.

Note: It is absolutely not possible to say, whether your custom posting type is properly built in terms of SEO. It could happen, i.e., that your custom post type has incorrect settings, like there are no title and description, or all custom posts are at noindex, or something like this.

If you are using default posts or pages - everybody who uses Wordpress is familiar with default WP setup, so it is possible to say, yes, these both content type are more or less suitting SEO needs.

Answer 3

A lot of blogging platforms tend to rank very highly because they have been well-optimized for search engines. Wordpress for instance has taken a lot of time to make sure that all of your meta tags are accurate, and they have built a very mobile-responsive design. As a result, many bloggers choose to use a platform such as Wordpress as they know that it has a high chance of ranking.

You do not have to use any platforms in order to make your own blog. You can rank websites without using Wordpress-like platforms. But it does require that you have a strong understanding of meta tags, mobile responsive user interfaces and other good web design practices.

It's quite possible to outrank a Wordpress site if your design and architecture is better than Wordpress. This is not an easy feat to accomplish. But it's very possible to do if you're an excellent developer or you need certain customizations for your blog that your blogging platform doesn't offer.