Any Tips For putting up a new site and not loosing rankings?
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We are switching one of our sites to a magento site and dont want to loose current rankings what are the best practices for this? Same Domain but the deep url pages will change urls
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We had the same issue moving our site from nopcommerce to magento. The structure of the site in regards to category and even file extension (.aspx to .html) changed. We had over 2000 products and to create redirects for all of them was quite a bear.
What we ended up doing was to look into Google's rankings of our top 500 pages and focus on getting those redirected initially. Checking both the supplemental and primary indexes helped us to figure out which ones to do. I also ended up using excel and its formulas to create the redirect links enmass and then copied them to my .htaccess file. Also too, if you had a specific directory where your ecommerce site use to be located ( we had /Store/) create that directory and place your .htaccess in that file with Symlinks turned On.
This seemed to take care of everything for us and helped us to focus on links that were actually indexed.
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Good point!
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Try if you can use the sitemap file of the old website (or e.g. from Google Webmasters / Analytics) and keep as much urls in the same format as possible (e.g. setting them via a script in the db of magento).
I normally create a .htaccess file containing the necessary 301 with a script or notepad++ (using regexp). But depending on the number of urls this might not be an option.
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Redirect all old URL's to their new counterparts as mentioned by Richard, but also make sure your site architecture and navigation remain similar. If in your old site your internal link structure made pages A, B and C seem the most important, make sure in your new sites layout that dosn't suddenly change so that pages X, Y and Z suddenly seem like the most important pages.
If a page took three clicks to get to before, it should still take three clicks to get there.
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I know nothing about Magento, so let me get that out of the way : )
Either A) you have to do a 301 within the .htaccess file on all the URLs that are changing.
redirect 301 /old-url.php http://www.your-domain.com/new-url.php
Or place PHP code within the header (if you can) that will test the page, extract the URL, see if it is valid (within a database - dunno if Magento has one) and redirect to the new URL when applicable.
Keep an eye in your SEOmoz campaigns for 404 errors or your Google Webmaster Tools.
Hope that helps
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Same Domain- but the deep url pages will change urls
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Is this site still at the same domain? Will URLs change?
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