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
-
Any body can help me to make my web site seo freindly?
any body can help me to make my web site seo freindly? i have not big budget please email me fabric35@hotmail.com
Web Design | | fabric-fabric0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Site Speed for Magento Site
We have our site all ready for test users but the site speed is painfully slow. Our developers are a bit stymied about what to do. Is anyone a site speed expert or know of anyone good that can evaluate our site and tell us what's going wrong? Thanks!
Web Design | | EcomLkwd1 -
Major URL changes in new site launch
Hey Guys - we recently launched a new website for a client. Prior, all of their URLs were dynamic via an old-school Cold Fusion CMS. We basically had to rewrite 90% of the sites URLs (site is like 300 pages). The new URLs are SEO friendly and the on-page SEO is strong; but the page rank/authority is starting from scratch from these pages and placement has decreased more most of the new pages with competitive keywords. We set up all of the 301 redirects properly and are actively monitoring in Google Webmaster Tools. **Anything else I can do to lessen the pain and get these pages higher page rank/authority sooner rather than later?**Thanks for all of your help.
Web Design | | NobleStudios0 -
How can we improve our e-commerce site architecture to help best preserve Page Authority?
Today I installed the SEOMoz toolbar for Firefox (very cool, highly recommended). I was comparing our site http://www.ccisolutions.com to this competitor: http://www.uniquesquared.com For the most part, the deeper I go in our site the more the page authority drops. We have a few exceptions where the page authority of a subcategory page is actually better than the cat. page one level up. In comparison, when I was looking at http://www.uniquesquared.com I noticed that their page authority stays at "21" on every single category page I visit. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Is this potentially a problem with the tool bar or, is there something significantly different about their site architecture that allows them to maintain that PA across all category and sub category pages? Is there something fundamentally wrong with our (http://www.ccisolutions.com) site architecture? I understand that we have longer URLs, but this is an old store with a lot of SKUs, so we have decided not to remove the /category/ and /product/ from the URLs because the 301 redirects that would result wouldn't pass all of the authority they've built up over the years. Interested to know viewpoints on the site architecture and how it might be improved. Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
Site Ranks on Page 1 - Would launching new site hurt that
Hello, I currently have a website ranking in the top 7 for my main keyword. The website was built in 2004 and is definitely outdated, yet still ranks very high and brings in business. If i launched a new site on this domain, what would happen to my rankings? Would they drop? would they rise? If i don't launch the new site, will this site eventually drop due to being old and outdated? Any advice would be helpful...
Web Design | | Prime850 -
Considering site navigation options
I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement. I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks. (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers). I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion. This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories. What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system. I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with. Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong? Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?
Web Design | | EugeneF0