Two Week eCommerce Site Migration - how to handle visibility
-
Good day All,
We have a eComm site with over 100K pages and migrating to a new site design, new CMS and with a new URL structure for top level URLs only. Product URLs not changing (thank goodness!).
We have outlined our strategy for redirects, indexation, 404s, etc. The missing piece of the puzzle is that we're only allowing 10% visitors to see new site at launch and increase visibility over two week; therefore, my question is do we not allow indexing of new site until 100% visibility to all users? How do we manage the redirects for limited visibility?
My gut says don't bother for such a short period of time and block new site from SEs until 100% visibility. Since the site would be blocked how are redirects managed? Should we be using a 302 initially then switch to 301 or use a 503 code to indicate "hey, maintenance happening - come back later" with a time frame?
Hope that's clear and any tips greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
WMCA
-
Ideally, that's what I would have done. Have new site on a subdomain disallow, noindex everything and allow user transition and testing to go forward without impacting SERPS.
Unfortunately, someone's bright idea (before I was hired) was to transition site entirely within two weeks and take down the old one right away, hence the pickle.
We understand the ramifications of large 301'ing but our current site is terrible for many reasons (grandfather/legacy issues) and our SERP visibility is good but not where we should be. That's why loss in traffic is a gamble worth taking because our new site will be 1000% improved from a SE & user perspective. Don't get me wrong, we don't take the loss likely b/c we are the 2nd largest online retailer in our market.
About 2500 top level URLs are changing.
-
May I ask why your only allowing 10% to view? Is this a way of A/B testing the new design?
Regardless, you'll want to keep your new designed pages Noindexed, nofollow until you are ready to push them live as a whole.
How many of the top level url's are you changing? From my experience, 301'ing a large amount of pages will result in a loss of traffic. If you can manage and spread them out over a time period you may have better luck.
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
-
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
301 or Canonical - Ecommerce Site Question
We are making a change to our Navigation and this includes having to change the URL structure of a few pages of our site. Due to issues with the CMS (that are out of my control) we are unable to keep the current URL structure of two of our highest ranking pages. Our site is an E-commerce Site The Structure is changing from..... www.domain.com/page/highrankingpage <----OLD PAGE RANKED WELL to www.domain.com/category/highrankingpage <----NEW PAGE Generally I would have 301 'd this page but I found out that our Tech team added a Canonical to this page instead....(showing the high ranking page to the Search Engines) and on our site the visitors are able to browse the website getting the new page. BOTH PAGES ARE BASICALLY IDENTICAL (Same Content) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical# Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMcMullen0 -
Ecommerce Site homepage , Is it okay to have Links as H2 Tags as that is relevant to the page ?
Hi All, I have a Rental site and I am bit confused with how best do my H Tags on my homepage I know the H1 is the most important, Then H2 Tags and so on.. and that these tags should really be titles for content. However, I have a few categories (links) on my homepage so I am wondering if I could put these as H2 Tags given that it is relevant to the page . H3 Tags will my News and Guides etc , H4 Tags will the whats on the footer. I am attached a made up screenshot of what I propose for my homepage if someone could please give it a quick look , it would be very much appreciated. I have looked at what some competitors do a lot of them don't seem to have h2's etc but I know it's an important factor for rankings etc. Many thanks Pete dJSFQwI
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
My site still out of rank
Hello, I am working on a site for past 3 months, here are the problems with this site, 1. It had a forum full of spam becuase initially captcha was not included, 10000 spam backlinks 2. Affiliate page was also hit by spam about 4000 spam backlinks which were either not existing or porn etc.... 3. Too many internal links which were indexed, these additional links were generated due to tags, ids, filters etc. Existing SEO team decided to remove the forum and after 30 days they blocked it in robots. But within 30 days the site moved from 3rd page to no where. Now after few days lator internal links are also cleaned by putting following in the robots, Dissallow: / *? Dissallow: / *id Dissallow: / *tag Links are now cleaning up, all the spam and bad links are now put into disavow file and sent to google via disavow tool. On daily bases good quality links are been produced such as through content, article submission, profile linking, Bookmarks etc. The site is still not any where on top 50 results. The impressions are decreasing, traffic also do not rise as much. How do you see all this situation. What do you suggest and how long do you think it will take to return to top 10 when good linking is being done and all preventive measures are being taken. I would appreciate any feedback on it. Thank you. Site URL: http://www.creativethemes.net keywords: magento themes, magento templates
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
Two sites, two domains, two brands, 98% same content
There are two affiliated brick & mortar retail stores moving into e-commerce. For non-marketing reasons separate e-commerce websites are desired. The two brands are based in separate (nearby) cities in the same Canadian province. Although the store name and branding will be different, the content on the site will either be near duplicates or exact duplicates. The more I look into this on Google and SEOmoz QA, the more I am concerned about the SEO implications of this. SEOmoz QA: Multiple cities/regions websites - duplicate content? "So, yes, because you are offering the same services at second location, you are thinking correctly about the need to rewrite all content so it's not a duplicate of site #1." Duplicate content - Webmaster Tools Help "However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic… In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results. ... Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results." Unfortunately, I would say there's very little chance that rewritten content will happen in the foreseeable future. With that said, I'd be greatly appreciative of the concerns and remedies that the SEOmoz community has to offer (even if they're for future use). Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
Best Format for URLs on large Ecommerce Site?
I saw this article, http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/common-ecommerce-technical-seo-problems/, and noticed that Geoff mentioned that product URLs format should be in one of the following ways: Product Page: site.com/product-name Product Page: site.com/category/sub-category/product-name However, for SEO, is there a preferred way? I understand that the top one may be better to prevent duplicate page issues, but I would imagine that the bottom would be better for conversion (maybe the user backtracks to site.com/category/sub-category/ to see other products that he may be interested in). Also, I'd imagine that the top URL would not be a great way to distribute link juice since everything would be attached to the root, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eTundra0 -
Whats the best way to handle product microformats such as hproduct, goodrelations on ecommerce for Google?
With web3.0 results with microfrmatting showing in google, yahoo etc through reviews, instock, events, sales, pricing etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RampUpInteractive0