When moving my ecommerce website from one host to another should I also 301 all my image urls?
-
I'm going to be 301'ing a lot of pages, but should i also 301 my image URLS? Any other helpful hints would be awesome too, as this will be my first move online ever. We've been with our host 3 years.
Thanks!
Paul Serra
STbands.com, Owner
-
Hi Paul,
301'ing old urls to new urls is enough. Additionally you can add a custom 404 page for the other old urls which may be created becuase of tags, categories etc.
-
I would love to hear what decision you went with and how it turned out in the data. I moved a large ecommerce site at the beginning of the year and didn't touch any image url's and they never showed up in 404 errors either. I'm guessing the links to our site were not to product images but rather to product pages.
Even though I did it this way, I would love to hear how your's came out.
Thanks!
-
Excellent question. I wouldn't worry about redirecting images, but you can: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3778347/is-it-ok-to-http-redirect-images
-
Hi Paul,
We're going through and following up with older questions that are still marked unanswered. Do you have any questions still? Can you share what you did, and any lessons learned so we can have them for the archives for the next time someone's in a similar situation?
Thanks!
-
Guillaume,
Thanks for the answer. I am basically moving ecommerce platforms to answer your question. I am keep the same domain (www.stbands.com). If you want to get even more specific i am moving from storesonline to corecommerce. Here's some more info:
- All meta tags, URLS, content is virtually going to be the same except my product pages and normal pages will end with .html, however my category pages will still be /categoryname (like a directory).
- My category URLS seem to build in a mod re-write fashion, which I hear is better for SEO (like /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/).
- I have set all my pages to use the rel=cananical tag, so if you are on the category /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/ it cananicals back to /head-sweatbands
- The images are changing names as I upload them on a product because it auto creates new sizes. This differs from our old host and may affect our vertical image rankings. Should I 301 the image URLS?
- I am keeping the www. in my domain name, as opposed to just domain.com to keep everything the same.
- CoreCommerce automatically seems to make my products uppercase in the URL as they are in the title, but the url works both lowercase and uppercase so its not case sensitive.
This is just an overview of some things I think I have most of my bases covered, but i'm aiming for a april 1st launch / move for the new site. Any other pointers / suggestions?
-
Hi Paul,
When you say that you willl change "host", do you mean web hosting provider, domain name or ecommerce platform? If you meant :
Hosting provider : you shouldn't have to do any 301 redirect as all the Urls will remain the same, only the IP adress of the website will change, but this is not a big deal.
Domain name : If you have a apache server, you could create a .htaccess with single line of code that will redirect any pages or images on the old domain to the new one, without having to create a single 301 for every file.
Ecommerce platform : This one is the hardest one. If you are to switch to a new ecommerce platform, I suggest you try to keep as much as possible the same Url structure as you had if possible as it already looks good.
Depending on the type of move you do, please specify the kind of change you will be doing so we can help you better.
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google. Does anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
Technical SEO | | Chophel
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
How to add parameter to url with 301 and wildcard
So this is my situation. I want to redirect : example.com/post1/ to example.com/post1/?m=yes
Technical SEO | | CarlLSweet0 -
Http urls on a new https website
Hi, If a site is quite new and setup as https from the beginning why would http variations exist? There are 301 redirects in place from the http to the https variation and also canonical tags pointing back to the http variation? This seems contradictory to me. I'm not sure why the http variations exist at all but they have gone to the trouble of redirecting these to the https variation indicating that it is the variation of choice but at the same time using a canonical tag that indicates the http variation is the original/main url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MVIreland0 -
New website on new url?
We have a new website on a new url (been up for around 2 years now) and our old website is slowly fading in the background, we are now at the point where the money is still ok but we are having issues running both side by side, we have a calculator on each page and are thinking about removing this and adding a box with please order from our new site here (with url of similar page). Now the issue is we don't want to link for SEO purposes and google hammer us (thinking of no - following these) and we also have a penalty we got in 2012 on the site but we did get out of this, would this cause any issue to the new site?
Technical SEO | | BobAnderson1 -
Slow website
Hi I have just migrated from a custom written php/mysql site to a site using wordpress and woocommerce. I couldnt believe the drop in speed . I am using a few plugins for wordpress - contact forms / social sharing. and I have a few woocommerce plugins for taking payment etc. I am hosting images css's and js's on W3 Total Cache and MAXCDN hoping to speed the site up but tools at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt sometimes show that the time between browser request and reply can be between 1 and 15 secs. I have searched all day looking for a post I read about two months ago with a tool that seems to look at server responce and redirect processing etc hoping it would help but cant find it. If anyone knows what I am talking about I would appreciate them posting a link The site is http://www.synergy-health.co.uk and an example of an inner page is http://www.synergy-health.co.uk/home/shop/alacer-emergen-c-1000-mg-vitamin-c-acai-berry-30-packets-8-4-g-each/ Any suggestions please? Perhaps I have w3total cache set wrong? Also, as the has been tanked and is in freefal iin google ranking since January would this be a good time to change the structure of Url from home/shop/product to domain.name/brand/product? Thanks in advance !
Technical SEO | | StephenCallaghan0 -
Combining 2 blogs into one. What is quicker, easier and better - rel canonical or an htaccess/ 301?
The objective I have is to archive an entire blog (which I no longer have time to keep up) with multiple posts over 4years , into another blog as a a folder. My question: would it be quicker and easier to do a rel canonical, or separately list all pages in htaccess and do a 301 redirect.
Technical SEO | | charlesgrimm0 -
Why do I have one page showing as two url's?
My SEOMoz stats show that I have duplicate titles for the following two url's: http://www.rmtracking.com/products.php and http://www.rmtracking.com/products I have checked my server files, and I don't see a live page without the php. A while back, we converted our site from html to php, but the html pages have 301's and as you can see the page without the php is properly redirecting to the php page. Any ideas why this would show as two separate url's?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0 -
Switching ecommerce CMS's - Best Way to write URL 301's and sub pages?
Hey guys, What a headache i've been going through the last few days trying to make sure my upcoming move is near-perfect. Right now all my urls are written like this /page-name (all lowercase, exact, no forward slash at end). In the new CMS they will be written like this: /Page-Name/ (with the forward slash at the end). When I generate an XML sitemap in the new ecomm CMS internally it lists the category pages with a forward slash at the end, just like they show up through out the CMS. This seems sloppy to me, but I have no control over it. Is this OK for SEO? I'm worried my PR 4, well built ecommerce website is going to lose value to small (but potentially large) errors like this. If this is indeed not good practice, is there a resource about not using the forward slash at the end of URLS in sitemaps i can present to the community at the platform? They are usually real quick to make fixes if something is not up to standards. Thanks in advance, -First Time Ecommerce Platform Transition Guy
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0