What is the most effective way to migrate an ecommerce site?
-
I am about migrate a 1500 product ecommerce site from Netsuite to Volusion.
The url structure is not going to be the same so I need to know the most effective way of redirecting the old urls to the new site. Is there an easier method than collecting the most popular pages and creating a 301 xml page and upload it once the site goes live?
-
You can use Google Webmaster tools to flag up pages that should be de-indexed once they have been 301'd or if they now 404. This should speed up the process and ensure that pages that don't get indexed very often don't hang around.
-
I use a subdomain for a blog. I would prefer to have a blog that was abc.com/blog, but that is not possible with Volusion. You may want to consider hosting images offsite. This will save bandwidth overage charges. Those fees can eat you up. Make sure you don't host video on your Volusion server.
-
I kinda came into this after the schedule was set so I was given the task of making the best SEO decisions I could. Thanks for the advice. It confirms for me alot of what I already thought. Any thoughts on the blog work around since they don't have a way of integrating WordPress or anything? I'm guessing I need to recomend a subdomain like "blog.domainname.com" or something but just wanted ot pick your brain. Thanks again.
-
I am familiar with Volusion. You will want to take your time. Get get the new site set up on a test server. Make sure it is working the way you want. To do this right, this will take a while. Make the switch AFTER your busy selling season is over. For most of us, this is after Christmas. You will want to do 301 redirects. You could try to do them for all pages, but I think it is important to do them for the pages you are currently receiving inbound links. This will flow the juice and authority to your new web site. Is there a way to get a the old website de-indexed faster? I don't know the answer to this.
You will loose some SEO rankings at first, but Volusion has some decent SEO tools. Make sure you use SEO friendly URL's. Set up all the meta tags (title and descriptions). Use canonical tags for your pages. block crawler access to your shopping cart.
You will be tweeking things for months, but take the time to do it as much of it as you can correctly from the start.
-
A 301 xml page? That's a new one to me. Where did you hear that?
If you're running Apache, Nginx or IIS 7+ you could use a mod_rewrite to possibly set up a global rewrite but that's provided that your URLs share some structure (i.e. they both have the product name in the URL). Otherwise you'll need to set up some sort of 301s and that might mean painstakingly mapping URLs. Remember, if you don't 301 anything you'll be facing a nasty list of problems including
- Duplicate content penalty (until the spiders de-index the old data)
- Lost traffic
- Lost page rank
- Loss of hair
- Loss of job
- Loss of income
So I wouldn't try to cross your fingers and hope for the best. Get a proper 301 up or else!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
I want to load my ecommerce site xml via CDN
Hello Experts. My ecommerce site - abcd.com
Technical SEO | | micey123
My ecommrece site sitemap abcd.com/sitemap.xml
My subdomain - xyz.abcd.com ( this is blank page but status is 200 which runs from cdn) My ecommerce site sitemap abcd.com/sitemap.xml contains only 1 link of subdomain sitemap- xyz.abcd.com/sitemap.xml
And this sitemap- xyz.abcd.com/sitemap.xml contains all category and product links of abcd.com So my query is :- Above configuration is okay? In search console I will add new property - xyz.abcd.com. and add sitemap xyz.abcd.com/sitemap.xml So Google will able to give errors for my website abcd.com Purpose - I want to run my xml sitemap from cdn that's why i have created subdomain like xyz.abcd.com Hope you understood my query. Thanks!0 -
Site dropped from SERP
Hello, I've been ranking a site for the last 5 months with good success, ranking on the first page for a high traffic keyword. In the beginning of September however, my site completely dropped out of the SERPs for several of those keywords yet my site was still indexed and there was no penalty applied to my site via search console. I would assume this maybe because of the update during the time.My site came back again a week later and it was ranking much higher on the first page (#2). Today, I just checked the SERPs and my site is now gone again. It was there this morning but now as of two hours ago it is gone, as well as one of my main competitors. My site is still indexed and no penalties via search console. Does anyone know what causes these types of issues? Im assuming my site will come back in a week or so with hopefully the same or better ranking, but when I have disruptions like this it really hurts my organic traffic. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
Site Navigation
Hello, I have some questions about best practices with site navigation & internal linking. I'm currently assisting aplossoftware.com with its navigation. The site has about 200 pages total. They currently have a very sparse header with a lot of links in the footer. The three most important keywords they want to rank for are nonprofit accounting software, church accounting software and file 990 online. 1. What are your thoughts about including a drop down menu in the header for the different products? (they have 3 main products). This would allow us to include a few more links in the header and give more real estate to include full keywords in anchor text. 2. They have a good blog with content that gets regularly updated. Currently it's linked in the footer and gets a tiny amount of visits. What are your thoughts about including it as a link in the header instead? 3. What are best practices with using (or not using) no follow with site navigation and footer links? How about with links to social media pages like Facebook/Twitter? Any other thoughts/ideas about the site navigation for this site (www.aplossoftware.com) would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Should I migrate clients site to older established domain?
I have a new client who had a domain that was established in 2004. About six months ago they moved their site over to a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new one. Their pagerank on the new domain is 1, and I can not find any historical data on the older domain. Would it be beneficial to move the site back to the old domain assuming that it had a higher pagerank? And is there a way to find out what the pagerank of the old site was before the redirect?
Technical SEO | | whmgatx0 -
Why my site is not indexing in google
In google webmaster i have updated my sitemap in Mar 6th..There is around 22000 links..But google fetched only 5300 links for long time...
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Chandran
I waited for 1 month till no improvement in google index..So apr6th we have uploaded new sitemap (1200 links totally)..,But only 4 links indexed in google ..
why google not indexing my urls? Is this affect our ranking in SERP? How many links are advisable to submit in sitemap for a website?0 -
Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
Technical SEO | | Robbie8299
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!0 -
ECommerce Platform Change
I'm just entering the process of switching web developer companies, and I was wondering what process would be best for redirecting our old product (new and used cars) pages. Our current design leaves much to be desired seo wise (http://www.resslermotors.com/index.asp?cmd=detail&vin=1FTSX30F3XEC01446&stocknumber=123911&sg=ocor5h42d2yhkla&Make=Ford&parCertifiedFlag=&Model=&parVehTypeID=&p=6&page=1), and redirecting all of them seems like it would be pretty complicated. In addition to that, we currently have 35,000 pages. Is there a practical way to do redirects with this many pages?
Technical SEO | | ResslerMotors0 -
Should I create mini-sites with keyword rich domain names pointing to my main site?
Hi, I'm new to seomoz (and seo in general) and loving it so far. My main domain name is more of a brandname than a search engine friendly list of keywords. I rank well for some keywords I optimized for, and less so for the more competitive keywords. I was wondering if making one page minisites hosted on keyword rich domain names could help in this respect? What I want to do is just have a single page with a few paragraphs of content and links to the main site. I am not looking for links to boost the main site, just for the minisites to do better for several keywords. Will this help? Is this ok, or against some Google policy? Can this hurt the main site rankings? Thank you! **Edit: **I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords have much less on-page elements than my page, have about the same domain trust and also very little inbound links. The only factor I can see is the exact match of keywords in the domain name.
Technical SEO | | Eladla1