Change e-commerce platform and domain name SEO issue.

[ide-home02]

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.

[MoosaHemani]

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!

[ide-home02]

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.

[danrawk]

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.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok this is tough!

1. You need to shift your eCommerce Platform!
2. 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.