Redesign of an ecommerce site
-
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want.
We want to achieve a better and cleaner looking website. It's a more like template redesign. But adding extra functionalities.
We will add upselling and crossselling features to product pages. Some products have reviews and some don't. If a product doesn't have a review random testimonials will replace the reviews.
We will redirect all urls's if category structure changes.
All content title, headings remain same.
Any suggestions are welcome
-
yes, you could preserve and possibly increase your rankings.
First, Index your valuable resources ( content, urls, metadata, keyword rankings, etc) that have to be preserved.
If you use Joomla content management system & sh404SEF, you may rewrite URLs and keep them the same as on the current site.
Here is an example of site recently migrated without losing its rankings:
http://www.alaskaflyfishinggoods.com/new-flies-for-2011/view-all-products.html
-
Even if your rankings temporarily drop, in the long run everything should work out better for you with more conversions.Make it the best site you possibly can and your visitors will appreciate it.
-
Keeping the 301's in mind - I don't think you'd lose any rankings by changing the theme/colorscheme etc - provided all the new pages that you are redirecting to contain the same content. I would like to point out that enhancing your site for your visitors is always going to have a positive effect since that's what Google likes
-
We are thinking to redesign our ecommerce site and was wondering would we loose our google rankings in any way? That's something we don't want.
I think that you need a different attitude. When you redesign a website you should use that as an opportunity to IMPROVE your SEO. You should be studying or hiring a consultant to identify changes that you KNOW will make your site better.
Don't go into this with fear. Go in with knowledge and careful planning.
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
-
Ecommerce Category Pages
First, let's define the terminology for the various types of ecommerce pages. The terminology differs from organization to organization: Product Description Pages (PDPs): These pages have a single product, pricing, an "add to cart" button, reviews, and a product description. Product Listing Pages (PLPs): These are product category/subcategory pages that have product image links and text links to Product Description Pages (PDPs). Category Pages: These pages have subcategory image and text links to subcategory pages. No product images are displayed Hybrid Category Pages: these pages combine sub-Category Images and text at the top of the page and product listings below. Our CMS currently does not allow us to create hybrids. This conversation revolves primarily around mobile. Our ecommerce team is having discussions around the appropriate use of PLPs vs Category pages. After doing a quick audit of the mobile sites of some top ecommerce players, there is definitely a trend to use Category Pages at the top of the category and sub-category hierarchy and use PLPs at the very bottom. The logic from a usability perspective is to allow visitors to navigate a site without ever using the hamburger navigation. ex: Baby (Category Page) => Car Seats (Category Page) => Convertible Car Seats (PLP) The sites I audited all had hamburger menus. A visitor would navigate from a home page image for "Baby," an image on the "Baby" page to "Car Seats", and an image on the "Car Seats" page to the Convertible Car Seats page. At that point, they would be able to shop for "Convertible Car Seats" on a PLP. This appears to be excellent UX and easy to use navigation. Theoretically, good for SEO as well. In short, category and subcategory pages are being used as navigation to allow visitors to easily navigate to the bottom of the hierarchy and shop on the most narrow page in the hierarchy. Much easier to use than a hamburger menu, but it does entail more clicks. The discussion revolves around allowing users to shop for product at a higher level in the taxonomy. For example, what if a visitor wants to shop all Car Seats? In the above taxonomy, we are precluding users from shopping in this manner. There is no "Car Seats" PLP. Our CMS has the ability to create both a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats". We could theoretically place an image on the "Car Seats" category page for "View All Car Seats", and allow users to click to a "Car Seats" PLP. None of the major ecommerce players I've audited are adding a PLP option higher up in the hierarchy. That doesn't mean that it's not good UX. Problems: From an SEO perspective, having a Category Page and a PLP for "Car Seats" would cause cannibalization - they would be competing for the same keywords. I am skeptical that canonicals would work. The pages are not near duplicate content. One page has category images, the other has product images. We could place content blocks on the page to make them more similar. We could noindex the PLP, but that's a waste of internal link juice. Need advice: Will canonicals work in this situation? Should we trash this idea entirely? Does adding a PLP add value or confusion? Is noindex a good idea? Is there an option to target keyword variations with the PLP? Is there another solution?
Web Design | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Should I Use An Animated Javascript Responsive Site
Hi, hope someone might be able to help me with this. I am setting my son up with a website for his small painting and decorating company. However, I am a wordpress stalwart and he has seen a theme which is a javascript animated responsive theme from template monster. Its not my choice just he is adamant that he wants it. However, I am slightly concerned that Google cannot index as well with these kind of sites as they would with a standard HTML site. I would be grateful if someone could confirm if they can be indexed etc. The content appears in what I can only describe as lightboxes. Thanks
Web Design | | denismilton0 -
Comparing the site structure/design of my live site to my new design
Hi SEOmoz team, for the last few months I've been working on a new design for my website, the old, live design can be viewed at http://www.concerthotels.com - it is primarily focused on helping users find hotels close to concert venues throughout North America. The old structure was built in such a way that each concert venue had a number of different pages associated with it (all connected via tabs) - a page with information about the venue, a page with nearby hotels to the venue, a page of upcoming events, a page of venue reviews. An example of these pages can be seen at: http://www.concerthotels.com/venue/madison-square-garden/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-events/madison-square-garden-events/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-reviews/madison-square-garden-reviews/304484 The /venue-hotels/ pages are the most important pages on my website - and there is one of these pages for each concert venue - they are the landing pages for about 90% of the traffic on the website. I decided that having four pages for each venue was probably a poor design, since many of the pages ended up having little or no useful, unique content. So my new design attempts to bring a lot of the venue information together into fewer pages. My new website redesign is temporarily situated at: (not currently launched to the public) http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend The equivalent pages for Madison Square Garden are now: http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue/madison-square-garden/304484 (the page above contains venue information, events and reviews) and http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 I would really appreciate any feedback from you guys, based on what you think of the new site design compared to the old design from an SEO point of view. Of course, any feedback on site speed, easy of use etc compared to the old design would also be greatly appreciated. 🙂 My main fear is that when I launch the new design (the new URLs will be identical to the old ones), Google will take a dislike to it - I currently receive a large percentage of my traffic through Google organic search, so I don't want to launch a design that might damage that traffic. My gut instinct tells me that Google should prefer the new design - vastly reduced number of pages, each page now contains more unique content, and it's very much designed for users, so I'm hoping bounce rate, conversion etc will improve too. But my gut has been wrong in the past! 🙂 But I'd love to hear your thoughts, and thanks in advance for any feedback, Cheers Mike
Web Design | | mjk260 -
Looking for feedback on our nonprofit site
I work for a nonprofit org which of course means a low budget and paying out of pocket for things (such as training). Our current website is done by a 3rd party vendor and although it looks nice, we can't make any changes to it without paying for it. (We can only upload documents). I'm wondering if anyone in this group will give their feedback on the site in terms of SEO and recommend a platform that would be relatively easy for a small shop to manage. Our site is www.coastalcommunityfoundation.org Thanks in advance
Web Design | | TinaA0 -
Best Way to Re-Direct traffic from existing site to new site?
Good Morning, I have an existing site (http://goo.gl/QKkpi) running on a slow server. We decided to create a new site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) with the intention of de-commissioning the first one. Both sites are on the same WMT account. What is the best way to permanently redirect any backlinks/traffic (all levels, from home page to product pages) from the old site to the new site (prior to shutting down the first one). Thanks a lot!
Web Design | | Prime850 -
Will upgrading my dedicated server improve my site speed
hi, at the moment i am concerned about my site speed for www.in2town.co.uk My hosting company is tmd hosting and my package is Intel Atom 330 1MB L2 Cache 1.6GH $159/mo $189/month500GBStorage4GBRAM10TBBandwidthi am looking at increasing this to**$219/mo** $289/month500GBStorage6GBRAM10TBBandwidthcan anyone let me know if this will make a difference to my site speed please
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860 -
What reason would scrapers, and syndication sites outrank all of our content?
Typing in any of our titles for content, scrapers and content syndication sites all outrank us by quite a bit. What is the main reason for this usually? I started noticing this happening quite a bit this year, and think maybe it has to do with panda. Has anyone figured out the reasoning?
Web Design | | upbuiltgames0 -
Finally have a budget for a great seo ecommerce site but need help choosing wordpress, joomla, modx, magneto or? Thank you in advance for your generosity of time
We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed. I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built. But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done. I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction. Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today. Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened. I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc.... I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you. But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business. Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins? Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla? We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content. We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo. I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto. Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites. We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers. When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into. I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls. I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used. I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product. Bottom line is we sell art. We sell pieces by specific artists. We are constantly buying and selling. I need something powerful that keeps up with our content
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments1