Change e-commerce platform and domain name SEO issue.
-
Hi,
We are looking to switch from Bigcommerce to either Magento or Shopify, but we have some concern about the redirecting of all URL and not sure where to help.
Also, we are looking to remove "hyphen" www.ide-home.com.au in our domain name, again it is all about 301 redirecting. We need SEO expert to help us with all changes that minimize the effect on Google. Does anyone can suggest which company or who we can ask for help? Thanks very much.
-
If you are looking for my adivce i will suggest you to go without changing the hyphen and here are my reasons for that.
Changing hyphen simply means changing the domain name for your website and redirection on the domain level always loose the link juice so your overall redirection from old domain to the new domain will loose the SEO power.
Changing eCommerce platform is great but for that you should always keep in mind that the new platform have lots and lots of Seo plugins like the platform should allow the cahngings in robots.txt, indepandance on the xml sitemap level, titles, descriptions and more SEO related areas should be covered within the new platform.
My point of view about your situation!
-
Hi Moosa,
Thanks for your true advise. We are still debating should we remove the hyphen on the domain name. One of our concern is the hyphen on the domain may affect SEO or Link Building, but we have no way to proof at this moment.
And we have read lots of articles, but still do not have conclusion. We are actually looking to redesign our e-commerce store and change to a better platform. After that we will run some online PR campaign, linking building and SEO works. So we have to decide weather we should keep the hyphen or should we remove the hyphen.
-
Moosa is correct!
It may be tempting to "start fresh", but don't give up all that great information and link juice when you switch! 301 every product, and category page you can. these will be (301) permanent redirects that will tell google this is the new home of your website.
as to removing the hyphen, you may be able to do a 301 in your server's .htacess file. depending on what redirection software your host offers, the code for this will vary slightly.
-
Ok this is tough!
- You need to shift your eCommerce Platform!
- You need to change your domain name (removing hyphen is same is changing to new domain)
If you are going to take all the two major changes on the blog so there is only one thing which is important and should be considered that is redirection. Domain level redirection from old domain to the new domain plus URL level redirection as this will help you save the rankings and traffic from inner pages (categories and products) that are ranking well in search engines like Google.
Do check that your next ecommerce platform should have all the SEO friendly plug-ins available or else you might see a dip in traffic, rankings and sales instead of improvements.
Also, you need to recheck your robots.txt to see if there is anything else which is going to affect your new domain and URL structure... at the same time update your sitemap xml accordingly.
There are many thing that can be witness after the deep analysis of the website but here are the basics that you should consider as most important.
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
-
301 Domain Redirect from old domain with HTTPS
My domain was indexed with HTTPS://WWW. now that we redirected it the certificate has been removed and if you try to visit the old site with https it throws an obvious error that this sites not secure and the 301 does not happen. My question is will googles bot have this issue. Right now the domain has been in redirection status to the new domain for a couple months and the old site is still indexed, while the new one is not ranking well for half its terms. If that is not causing the problem can anyone tell me why would the 301 take such a long time. Ive double and quadruple checked the 301's and all settings to ensure its being redirected properly. Yet it still hasn't fully redirected. Something is wrong and my clients ready to ditch the old domain we worked on for a good amount of time. backgorund:About 30 days ago we found some redirect loops .. well not loop but it was redirecting from old domain to the new domain several times without error. I removed the plugins causing the multi redirects and now we have just one redirect from any page on the old domain to the new https version. Any suggestions? This is really frustrating me and I just can't figure it out. My only answer at this point is wait it out because others have had this issue where it takes up to 2 months to redirect the domain. My only issue is that this is the first domain redirect out of many that have ever taken more than a week or three.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Is there a tool out there to check any domain that might be pointing to my existing domain?
Is there a tool out there to check any domain that might be pointing to my existing domain?
Technical SEO | | adlev0 -
SEO: open source e-commerece vs. off the shelf
I'm trying to decide on a web development company. Both would do our CMS with Wordpress, but for the e-commerce platform one would use shopify (off the shelf) and the other would use Woo-Commerce (open source). SEO wise is there any benefit of going one way or the other? I am worried the off the shelf (shopify) would be weaker because it would be hosted on a different server than the CMS, plus I think the url structure would be less flexible through shopify (keywords would be further down url structure). Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | dcostigan0 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1 -
Expressionengine SEO
One of my clients is using expressionengine CMS, and even the simplest things like creating unique page titles seem to be a nightmare. When I try to change page title via cms it also changes navigation menu. Any help will be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Thommas0 -
E-commerce site multi language product urls
Hi, On my E-commerce site I use optimized Url's (product names) with my native language (Hebrew) I am going to translate some of the product pages to English with differnat descriptions, correct layout, etc... But I was wandering about the product Url's. Should I stay with the original product URL and add a language parameter to the url? Should I add a completely new URL using the English product name? Of course what I'm worrying the most of is duplicate content. Thanks, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Moving domain.com to subdomain.domain.com
Hi, I like to do something, but first like to take some opinions from seomoz. My question is: 1. I have a domain: brandtrends.com and i like to move this from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com because: brandtrends.com is on the position #15 on the second page of SERP for my "brand" keyword. I like to move it under trends.brand.com but all inbound-links are @brandtrends.com What do you thing, if i move permanently 301 from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com does it rank under brand.com on the 1st page of SERP..? like to rank trends.brand.com under brand.com on results page...!!! I have the backlinks of brandtrends.com on my hands too, should i leave the inbound links @brandtrends.com and the new ones i build with trends.brand.com or should i change the inbound links from brandtrends.com to trends.brand.com Hope you got it! THanks
Technical SEO | | leadsprofi0 -
URLs: To Change or Not to Change
Hello, We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this: /africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania /central-south-america/galapagos-islands My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2. /central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises My questions are: Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to? This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem? Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post. 😉 Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0