ECommerce Platform Switch and SEO Loss

[JustinStupid]

Hi -

We're switching eCommerce platforms, and naturally we're worried about losing organic search ranking.

From what I've read on the message boards, I understand it's important to try to minimize as many 301 redirects as possible.

Here's my problem: Our Product URLs are like this (ex: http://www.stupid.com/fun/TOLMG.html). On the new platform, URLs cannot contain capital letters.

According to the new eCommerce platform's design team: "Google and other search engines do not see that as a change in URL, they are not case sensitive and will not affect search listings"

How accurate is this? And how come on our current platform, if I use an all lowercase URL, it get a 401? (ex: http://www.stupid.com/fun/tolmg.html) Will we be fine switching our Product URLs to lowercase on the new platform?

One thing also to note: Our Category URLs will remain the same. Are there any other areas of a typical eCommerce store that I should avoid changing URLs if I want to prevent SEO loss?

Thanks!

-Justin

[DanDeceuster]

301 redirects still pass link juice, just not quite all of it. If the content of the pages remains the same, you should still be fine, you might see a slight slip but not much.

[JustinStupid]

Thanks Matt - I didn't even think about pagination!

[JustinStupid]

Thanks Daniel - This is SUPER helpful.

So yeah, now it looks like I have to do tons of redirects, possibly to all my products and categories.

So if I potentially had to do 301 redirects to all my Category and Product pages, would I be risking losing my search engine rankings?

[mattbeswick]

Hi Justin,

URLs definitely aren't case sensitive from a Google point of view, although depending how the RewriteRule is set up (I'm assuming your web server is Apache) the e-commerce software itself might require a URL to be typed in the correct case.

I'd advise testing this on a subdomain first though (ie. dev.stupid.com)... but remember to block all search engines using robots.txt so you don't get some accidental indexing!

As for other things to think about, one would be pagination. Make sure the new tool deals with that the same as the old one or you'll end up with a load of broken links to your sub-pages. Static pages are also something to check, particularly if you have landing pages or product reviews posted through there.

I'm sure there'll be something I've missed but that'll give you more than enough to be getting on with

• Matt

[DanDeceuster]

Minimizing 301 redirects is good. Google is not case sensitive except in file names. So seomoz.org is the same to them as SEOMOZ.org or SeOMOz.org. Doesn't matter. Filenames like TOLMG.html are different than tolmg.html.

Try it. Find an image on your website like img.jpg. Now type in the full URL of that image with IMG.jpg instead of img.jpg at the end. Not the same.

So since you use .html as your URL ending, those are specific files with specific names, and they are case sensitive. You will have to redirect every uppercase file name to its lowercase counterpart when the new site is up. Or find a way to allow uppercase .html file names. That's how I understand things here.

[AlanBleiweiss]

It is SEO best practices to be consistent with case use, however upper case and Lower case are interchangeable on some server systems, while they are different/unique on others.  If the new system allows for you to use upper and lower case interchangeably, you should not see anything but 200's.  If that's true, then you should be okay.