Re-Platforming our ecommerce site. What am I missing?
-
Hello,
We're going to be moving our niche ecommerce site with a catalog of over 4,000 products over to a new ecommerce platform (magento). All url structure will be changing although about 70% of the content will be staying the same such as meta info and product page content.
We'll be doing 301 redirects of all old url's to new url's and we'll have a new google sitemap submitted immediatly.
So my question is.. What MORE can I do to keep our site from dropping in the search engines while our site is being re-crawled? Does anyone have any experience regarding what normally happens during a website replatform such as this?
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
Thanks for all the great advice guys. Our new url's will be keyword rich and seo friendly, our category urls will be much more seo friendly as our site we're moving off of only has numbers associated to those url's.
If anyone has anything else to add, I'd be happy to listen. This is a big move for us and a bit scary.
Thanks!
-
Just going to add to what these guys have said, you're thinking of the right thing.
One thing I'd suggest (but you've probably already thought of) is you say your URL structure is changing pretty radically. Is that because you're going to more englishy, SEO friendly URLs? If the URLs all change to just numbers and URL parameters that's obviously a bad thing.
-
Depending upon the link profile, domain strength and authority of your website, you should be good between 3 days to 1 month. I have seen scenarios where a 301'd URL got replaced with no drop in rankings in as little as 3 days and on a different website, lower authority as much as 30 days. But yes, you should be back to business with the steps you have already laid down.
Best of luck
-
Sounds like you've got your bases covered.
One suggestion - make sure you don't block the old URL's with your robots.txt file - you need to make sure the robots can reach the old pages, then follow the 301's to update their index.
I'd also use your favorite backlink profile to check external links - I'd contact the really juicy sites linking to you and inform them of the change, asking them to correct the link to the proper page, for server loads and users. This way, you won't be losing any juice through the redirects. Also make sure you're not losing juice by having external links go to 404 pages - would be a good time to recover all lost juice.
While you may drop in rankings temporarily, things should sort themselves out in a bit.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
Seo For Forum Sites
I have forum site.I've opened it 2 months ago.But there is a problem.Therefore my content is unique , my site's keyword ranking constantly changing..Sometimes my site's ranking drops from first 500.After came to 70s. I didn't make any off page seo to my site.What is the problem ?
Technical SEO | | tutarmi0 -
Why does my site rank so badly
its my turn to ask the interminable question why does my site rank so badly? site is: marriagerecords.org.uk. it was #1 for 'marriage records' on google for about 6 months. then it was 5th to 10th for about 2 months. now it is nowhere for this phrase and anything else, none of the pages I have written rank for anything. I have spent hours upon hours researching original content and I have got some great backlinks from sites like wrexham.gov.uk and somerset.gov.uk (some dont show in opensiteexplorer yet). im guessing im over-optimizing something but i'd love some concrete fixes if anyone could suggest any. thanks, tom
Technical SEO | | lethal0r0 -
301 permanent re-direct
My site can be accessed either with or without the www. Does this affect my search positions and do error 301-redirect cause any ill effects?
Technical SEO | | fireman0 -
E-Commerce site and blogs
We have e-Commerce site and an official blog to give advice about our products. This blog exists under our domain. Usually we build links directly to our site. Recently our ranking started going down. Also, we have been experiencing backlash for spam based on our link building (we are working on this, including a change of staff,but we cannot be sure that this will not happen again). This backlash has come through our social networking outlets (Facebook) in the form of very negative posts to our pages. One of our "SEOs" has devised a plan to use secondary blogs which we would start building links for. This blog would contain links back to our website. The idea is that the blog acts as a gate in a sense, in this way backlash is either posted on the blog or is directed at the blog. Also, we would be attempting to raise the page authority of these secondary blogs so in essence they act as high page authority links back to our website. The concern is that these secondary blogs may undermine the legitimacy of the official primary blog, which is still in its early stages as far as ranking and authority goes. Also, we are concerned that this technique would further undermine the legitimacy of the website itself by creating a larger "spam-like" presence, since visitors may see through the use of the secondary link through blogs.
Technical SEO | | ctam0 -
How a google bot sees your site
So I have stumbled across various websites like this: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/googlebot-spoofer/ The concept here is to be able to view your site as a googlebot sees it. However, the results are a little puzzling. Google is reading the text on my page but not the title tags according to the results. Are websites like this accurate OR does Google not read title tags and H1 tags anymore? Also on a slighly related note. I noticed the results show the navigation bar is being read first by google, is this bad and should the navigation bar be optimized for keywords as well? If it did, it would read a bit funny and the "humans" would be confused.
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports0