Preserving Social Shares Through URL Changes

[RMATVMC]

We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration

However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us.

In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this.  Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.

[iPullRank]

I think that's a great idea actually.

[RMATVMC]

Mike,

Thanks a ton for jumping in, I really appreciate it! I may have a hybrid solution using part of your suggestion.

We have toyed with the idea of creating a custom URL for each product (easy to automate on our end) that is tied to the product number. That way if the URL changes in the future (if we did an architecture redesign which will happen again I am sure) the share count will still be connected to the unique url so it will last over time. The URL that is shared just redirects to the product page just like if I was using a URL shortner. In testing we are having issues with Twitter being able to recognize this and increase the shared count number on the product page, even though shared count is recognizing it. So if we amended our code to call from the shared count API to pull the old numbers until passed by the new numbers like you suggested I believe it would give a very accurate result. Also moving forward url changes down the line would not affect the numbers because they are unique to the product number.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you see any pitfalls?

[iPullRank]

Hey Jared,

As you might imagine I have done this. In fact we did it with the iAcquire.com redesign when I was still there. Basically we built something custom to grab the social counts and display them in our custom social share buttons. Our Creative Director wanted to make custom share buttons because they are otherwise different sizes and it looks silly. Then we just set the old URL in one place in the CMS and it pinged SharedCount.com's API to get all the different share counts and display them.

A quick update to my post, from what I understand, social shares are hopping 301s for Google +1s only right now.

As far as your issue with the new shares being attributed to old URLs, that's something I've thought about as well. You could potentially build a similar solution that we had, but allow the new social shares to go with the new URL and check the number of social shares between the new and old URL whenever the page loads. Once the new URL surpasses the old one's share count just skip grabbing the old URL's share counts altogether and use the new URL for both displaying share counts and capturing new shares.

Let me know if that helps. I'm sure we can perfect a solution for you, but it will involve getting a little creative.

-Mike