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
-
The change is no problem, unless you have links to those pages. Then I would just make your CMS keep the url structure. (Create a sanbox and send the job to someone on elance)
If you change url structure: Create an index sitemap file. Then create a sitemap for the old site and the new site. If the urls are different in any way this is very good to do. Then submit the sitemap in webmaster tools and it should show two. Then google will crawl both pages faster and see the redirects and get your new URLs updated fast.
-
Hi Paul,
We're going through old unanswered questions and following up. How is that headache coming? Can you pass along any helpful lessons learned? If your question has been answered or you've had a helpful response, it'd be great if you could mark that as well. Thanks!
-
Sounds like you should just pick the way the CMS renders them, upper case. And just redirect any lowercase/mixedcase to that? As I said, it doesnt matter at all which you pick - but everything on your site must match.
-
James,
Consistency has me worried quite a bit, simply because some things I don't have control over - for example if i 301 all my URLS to lowercase (which i very much want to do) - than they will still show up with upper-casing in the sidebar and on the XML sitemap. This goes for my product lists as well, they show up with upper-casing via the way the CMS renders them.
I believe I have two choices, and please correct me if I’m wrong. I could 1.) either get the engineers to make it so everything is lowercase, which may or may not be possible OR 2.) I could fully embrace the new CRM - upper-casing and all, and just do 1 set of 301's from old site to new site.
Let me know what you think and thanks a bunch for your help thus far.
-
Are these URL's to categories/folders or product detail pages? Generally you'd expect the trailing slash on folders only, e.g.
/foldera/
/foldera/productaThe sitemap must match the exact URL's used on the site obviously - I would expect a slight penalty if your URL's in sitemap cause a redirect. That would be sloppy.
Having said all this, consistency is key - not necessarily whether there are slashes or not. You must be careful though that whichever someone uses (and they'll link to you both ways) you always redirect to the same style.
-
Hi Paul,
I think the previous URL structure was better and you should fix the new cart to use the same URLs as the old one. You'll probably have to go dig into the cart's source code to do that, but it might also simply be a settings in your ecommerce's control panel.
I doubt having a trailing slash to a URL will have a significant impact on your rankings. What is important is that you stay consistant in the way you link to your pages. If you change your URLs, be sure you 301 redirect every single previous URL to their new one.
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
-
Glossary Page - best practice
Hi guys, We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Best way to change URL for already ranking pages
Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
Robots txt. in page with 301 redirect
We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Bigcommerce only allows us to have https for our store only, not the other pages on our site, so we have a mix of https and http, how is this hurting us and what's the best way to fix?
So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Strange URL's for client's site
We just picked up a new client and I've been doing some digging around on their site. They have quite the wide variety of URL's that make for a rather confusing experience. One of the milder examples is their "About" page. Normally I would expect something along the lines of: www.website.com/about I see: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=About I'm typically a graphic designer and know basically nothing about code, but I just assume this has something funky to do with how their website was constructed. I'm assuming this isn't particularly SEO friendly, but it doesn't seem too bad. Until I got to another section of their site. It's a section that logically should look like: www.website.com/training/public-seminars It's: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=MT&Area=Seminars&Sub=MRM Now that's nonsensical to me! Normally if a client has terrible URL's, I'd say let's do some redirects, but I guess I'm a little intimidated by these. Do the URL's have to be structured like this for some reason? Am I missing some important area of coding here? However, the most bizarre example is a link back to their website from yellowpages.com. Where normally I would expect it to lead to their homepage, I get this bizarre-looking thing: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website And as you browse through the site, that strange domain stays. For example the About page is now: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/default.asp?Page=About I would try to google this but I have no idea where to even start! What is going on with these links? Will we be able to fix them to something presentable without breaking their website?
Technical SEO | | everestagency0 -
Building URL's is there a difference between = and - ?
I have a Product Based Search site where the URL's are built dynamically based on the User input Parameters Currently I use the '=' t o built the URL based on the search parameters for eg: /condition=New/keywords=Ford+Focus/category=Exterior etc Is there any value in using hypen's instead of = ? Could you please help me in any general guidelines to follow
Technical SEO | | Chaits0 -
How to best remove old pages for SEO
I run an accommodation web site, each listing has its own page. When a property is removed what is the best way to handle this for SEO because the URL will no longer be valid and there will be a blank page.
Technical SEO | | JamieHibbert0 -
Best way to condense content on a page?
We want to add a video transcript to the same page as the video, but it doesn't really fit the design of the page. Is it fine to use CSS/DIVs to either have a "click to read full transcript" or a scroll box?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0