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.
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
-
Content from Another Site
Hi there - I have a client that says they'll be "serving content by retrieving it from another URL using loadHTMLFile, performing some manipulations on it, and then pushing the result to the page using saveHTML()." Just wondering what the SEO implications of this will be. Will search engines be able to crawl the retrieved content? Is there a downside (I'm assuming we'll have some duplicate content issues)? Thanks for the help!!
Technical SEO | | NetStrategies1 -
Ecommerce site product reviews, canonicals – which option to choose?
Recently, I discovered that only the first 4 reviews on our product pages are crawled and indexed. Example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432 I'm assuming it's due to the canonical that's on the product page http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432" />. When you click on page 2 of the reviews, the url does not change, but the next batch of reviews appears on the product page. Same with page 3, etc… The problem is the additional pages are not being crawled and indexed. We have to have the canonical on the product page because our platform creates multiple urls for each product page by including each category where the product resides, related link parameters, etc in the product url (example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/patio-furniture/outdoor-furniture/253432) – trust me, it gets ugly! I've researched other Moz answers and I've found that there appears to be a couple of ways to fix the issue. Any ideas/help/guidance/examples on the below options is greatly appreciated!!!! Show only 4 reviews on the first page and place the remaining reviews on a new page by themselves (similar to how Amazon does it). However, I would rather keep all of the reviews on the product page if possible. Add page 2, page 3, etc parameters to the url to display the remaining reviews and adding rel=prev/next. If we chose option 2, would each product page have a different canonical? If so, would it create a duplicate content issue since the above-the-fold content, title tag and meta descriptions would all be the same? Also, would you include each additional page in the sitemap? We had a similar issue with our category pages and we implemented the "viewall" in the canonical. Would that work for our reviews? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Improvements0 -
Duplicate content on job sites
Hi, I have a question regarding job boards. Many job advertisers will upload the same job description to multiple websites e.g. monster, gumtree, etc. This would therefore be viewed as duplicate content. What is the best way to handle this if we want to ensure our particular site ranks well? Thanks in advance for the help. H
Technical SEO | | HiteshP0 -
Site Ranking Ahead of Us - Why?
I don't want to give details, but a competitor's site ranks ahead of us by a spot or 2 for some of our major keywords, and we can't figure out why. We have more content indexed, we have better content (my opinion), we're better optimized, we have significantly better MozRank and Majestic rankings, we have more links, we have better links. They have a plain Jane Wordpress blog, and their pages don't even have 300 characters. They don't have any awesome links. There are plenty of other sites besides ours that should outrank them. When I am using the various tools at my disposal, I can see why a competitor outranks us. I'm not obsessing, but this one, I just don't understand. Has anyone had this experience?
Technical SEO | | CsmBill0 -
How to find all the links to my site
hi i have been trying to find all the links that i have to my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk but i am not having any luck. I have used the open explorer but it is not showing all the links but when i go to my google webmaster page it shows me more pages than it does on the semoz tool. can anyone help me sort this out and find out exactly what links are going into my site many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Can URL re writes fix the problem of critical content too deep in a sites structure?
Good morning from Wetherby UK 🙂 Ok imagine this scenario. You ask the developers to design a site where "offices to let" is on level two of a sites hierachy and so the URL would look like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk/office-to-let. But Yikes when it goes live it ends up like this: http://www.sandersonweatherall.co.uk...s/residential/office-to-let Is a fix to this a URL re - write? Or is the only fix relocating the office to let content further up the site structure? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Impact of 401s on Site Rankings
Will having 401s on a site negatively impact rankings? (e.g. 401s thrown from a social media sharing icon)
Technical SEO | | Christy-Correll0