Re-Platforming our ecommerce site. What am I missing?

[DannyQR]

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!

[DannyQR]

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!

[icecarats]

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.

[NakulGoyal]

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

[Mark_Ginsberg]

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.