Lament

[sebrame]

Way back when we were early adopters for Muse, we were hammered by the WordPress world with warnings of 'bloated code' and 'non-semantic code' and such, and how it was going to tank our SEO. I'll never forget the jubilation a few weeks in when our company's site suddenly moved up into the top 5 organic SERP's for our target keywords.

Fast forward to a couple of month ago. I've been porting our own site, as well as others of our clients sites, back to WordPress, because it takes a while, and I don't want to have to do it in a panic when the Muse generated code starts to have growing issues. A few weeks in, and our own site is now coming in at the 21st organic SERP spot. Same content, same everything else, just now it's WordPress.

Thanks Adobe. Muse was a wonderful product that proved all detractors wrong. I was at the NAB Show in Las Vegas when Apple pulled the rug out from under Final Cut Pro users, and many of them swarmed to Adobe because you promised that you would NEVER do something like that to a customer, until you did.

[Nancy OShea]

I understand your frustration about Muse's EOL.  It's always disheartening when a software ends development and doubly so when you didn't see it coming.

sebrame  wrote

A few weeks in, and our own site is now coming in at the 21st organic SERP spot. Same content, same everything else, just now it's WordPress.

With regard to your SEO woes,  this often happens when you first transition websites from static .html to dynamic .php files.  I've done this many times and it's the same story whether or not you use WordPress.  But there are some things you can do to preserve your rankings.

1. Create a 301 redirect in your server's .htaccess file from .html to .php.
2. Use pretty URL permalink structure. 
   example.com/common-SEO-mistakes/
not example.com/?p=10467
3. WWW vs. non-WWW.  Google expects you to use only one.   If you're not sure which one to use,  go to Google search and type site:www.yourdomain.com.  Then do it with non-www  Use whichever yields the most results.  Also let Google Search Console (formerly called Webmaster Tools) know which is your preferred URL.
4. Use SEO Plugins.  This one is very popular.
   All in One SEO Pack | WordPress.org
5. Generate an XML Site Map and tell Google where to find it.
6. Optimize your site's speed and performance.  Google frowns on sites that take too long to load.  Using optimized WordPress hosting from Bluehost or others may cost you a bit more but the performance is better when compared to WP running on ordinary shared hosting.
   https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ 
   https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/
   

Good luck with your projects!

[sebrame]

All of these steps were in place prior to the change back to WordPress. I monitor Search Console daily to pick off any errant 404's. Not my first rodeo, as they say. But thanks.

Funny thing is, most of the top SERP positions have horrid Google PageSpeed results compared to ours.

For years the #1 position was consistently held by a competitor's site that was simply one full page Flash movie. No 'Ghost Text' hidden in the HTML to give the Google bot an idea of what the site was even about. So technically, their site was invisible to the bot, yet they were at the top for years, even before "backlinks" were a thing.

[Ussnorway]

yes money talks and what Google says is very different to what they do

[logikalt93914024]

I'm equally as frustrated. I wasn't one of the early adopters by any means. I continue to be wow'd by the functionality that Muse grants to graphic designers who want to bootstrap their own start-up. Is there a place where people are petitioning Adobe to continue supporting muse? Honestly, They should tank DW since hardly anyone uses/trusts it to do it's job anymore.

[Nancy OShea]

logikalt93914024  wrote

Is there a place where people are petitioning Adobe to continue supporting muse?

Don't waste your breath.  Muse will officially end in March 2021.  You can keep using it forever if you want to but do it at your own risk.  Eventually, browsers will stop supporting the code Muse generates and no amount of pleading or petitioning will prevent that.  The web is constantly changing but sadly Muse is not able to cope with the changes.

Ironically, all the ease of use that made Muse so appealing to designers was also it's biggest downfall.  If Muse had conformed more to the CSS Box Model and W3C Web Standards the way Dreamweaver does, it might have enjoyed a much longer shelf life.  But it wasn't so it's no longer sustainable.