What is the most effective way to migrate an ecommerce site?
-
I am about migrate a 1500 product ecommerce site from Netsuite to Volusion.
The url structure is not going to be the same so I need to know the most effective way of redirecting the old urls to the new site. Is there an easier method than collecting the most popular pages and creating a 301 xml page and upload it once the site goes live?
-
You can use Google Webmaster tools to flag up pages that should be de-indexed once they have been 301'd or if they now 404. This should speed up the process and ensure that pages that don't get indexed very often don't hang around.
-
I use a subdomain for a blog. I would prefer to have a blog that was abc.com/blog, but that is not possible with Volusion. You may want to consider hosting images offsite. This will save bandwidth overage charges. Those fees can eat you up. Make sure you don't host video on your Volusion server.
-
I kinda came into this after the schedule was set so I was given the task of making the best SEO decisions I could. Thanks for the advice. It confirms for me alot of what I already thought. Any thoughts on the blog work around since they don't have a way of integrating WordPress or anything? I'm guessing I need to recomend a subdomain like "blog.domainname.com" or something but just wanted ot pick your brain. Thanks again.
-
I am familiar with Volusion. You will want to take your time. Get get the new site set up on a test server. Make sure it is working the way you want. To do this right, this will take a while. Make the switch AFTER your busy selling season is over. For most of us, this is after Christmas. You will want to do 301 redirects. You could try to do them for all pages, but I think it is important to do them for the pages you are currently receiving inbound links. This will flow the juice and authority to your new web site. Is there a way to get a the old website de-indexed faster? I don't know the answer to this.
You will loose some SEO rankings at first, but Volusion has some decent SEO tools. Make sure you use SEO friendly URL's. Set up all the meta tags (title and descriptions). Use canonical tags for your pages. block crawler access to your shopping cart.
You will be tweeking things for months, but take the time to do it as much of it as you can correctly from the start.
-
A 301 xml page? That's a new one to me. Where did you hear that?
If you're running Apache, Nginx or IIS 7+ you could use a mod_rewrite to possibly set up a global rewrite but that's provided that your URLs share some structure (i.e. they both have the product name in the URL). Otherwise you'll need to set up some sort of 301s and that might mean painstakingly mapping URLs. Remember, if you don't 301 anything you'll be facing a nasty list of problems including
- Duplicate content penalty (until the spiders de-index the old data)
- Lost traffic
- Lost page rank
- Loss of hair
- Loss of job
- Loss of income
So I wouldn't try to cross your fingers and hope for the best. Get a proper 301 up or else!
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
-
URLs too long, but run an eCommerce site
Hi, When I started out I was pretty green to SEO, and didn't consider the usability/SEO impact of URL structure. Flash forward, I'm 5 years deep into using the following: mysite.com/downloads/category/premium-downloads/sub-category/ ("category" is quite literally one rung on the link - thanks, WordPress - however "sub-category" is a placeholder) I run a digital downloads store, and I now have 100s ofinternal links beholden to this hideous category linking structure. Not to mention external links at Google Ads, etc. I would LOVE to change this, but if I were to do so, what should I consider? For instance, is there a checklist for making a change like this? I was thinking of changing it to something like the following: mysite.com/shop/c/premium/sub-category/ And also, how much damage, if any, would this be doing to my SEO? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | LouCommaTheCreator
Lou1 -
What is the best way to deal with https?
Currently, the site I am working on is using HTTPS throughout the website. The non-HTTPS pages are redirected through a 301 redirect to the HTTPS- this happens for all pages. Is this the best strategy going forward? if not, what changes would you suggest?
Technical SEO | | adarsh880 -
Friendly URLs for MultiLingual Site
Hi, We have a multilingual website with both latin and non-latin characters, We are working on creating a friendly URL structure for the site. For the Latin languages can we use translated version of the URLs within the language folders? For example - www.site/cars www.site/fr/voitures www.site/es/autos
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Why my site is not indexing in google
In google webmaster i have updated my sitemap in Mar 6th..There is around 22000 links..But google fetched only 5300 links for long time...
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Chandran
I waited for 1 month till no improvement in google index..So apr6th we have uploaded new sitemap (1200 links totally)..,But only 4 links indexed in google ..
why google not indexing my urls? Is this affect our ranking in SERP? How many links are advisable to submit in sitemap for a website?0 -
Will rankings for my micro site rank better if I 301 redirect it to my main site?
This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
Technical SEO | | Robbie8299
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain" (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!0 -
Are article sites a good way to generate traffic and links
I read a lot that article sites are a great way to generate links and traffic but i would like to hear from people on here to see about their experience with article sites. I have tried article sites and i have to be honest that most of them are no follow links and have also not generate any traffic. I have written over 30 articles for free article sites with no traffic coming from them and this has been done over a eight month period can anyone recommend any good article sites that can produce traffic and also ones that produce do follow If you feel i am wasting my time putting articles on free sites then please do tell me
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Too many links on my site
Hi there everybody, I am a total SEO newbie and i am burning with questions. I had my site crawled and found out that it contains too many links. The reason is that it is a site where I constantly write news and articles and each one of them is a new Joomla item, thus a new link. I actually thought lots of content is good for SEO. How am I supposed to reduce the link amount?
Technical SEO | | polyniki0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0