I don't think Google will treat a capitalized keyword any different for ranking and such. In this case I would really focus on what looks best to the customer.

Remember your first priority should be usability and small tricks usually don't work.

I don't think it would be too bad. A cleaner name would be better but having the new images show is important too. More important in my opinion.

We use tildes pretty heavily on our new site. They seem to be okay with Google. However I did not want to use them because some foreign keyboards do not include the character... like Mexico.

So... do folks in Mexico type in our URLs by hand? Probably not common... but it is a potential problem. It is missing from other keyboards as well.

We use the tilde because we think it helps break up words we do not want to be seen as "together" in a string. All my product URLs have the product name, separated by dashes, then we use the tilde then comes the product number. We think it may help Google see the product title as a complete string and not include the product number. Not sure if it works or not.

I agree, if you can see the content in the code and it is available to the customer... I think you will be okay. I think hidden content means content someone on the outside cannot see or access.

Google may have the images cached and not realize you have new ones. One rule of thumb I try to promote is to always use unique image names. You may find your customers also see old images if an image of the same name already resides in the browser cache. I encourage our marketing folks to add a date stamp to the end of an image so it will be seen as new. Versioning will work as well.

We use an RSS feed for new product lists. We may have some lag time before a new product gets put in a category and able to be browsed to on our site. The RSS feed gives a few days head start getting these new products into the search engines. We redirect all RSS links back to the main site links that include canonical tags for the main product pages.

Thank you very much for the insight!

Sorry this is so confusing and thank you so much for your responses... there would be no subdomain when we do the soft launch... it would be http://www.sierratradingpost.com/Mens-Clothing.html (old site) vs http://www.sierratradingpost.com/mens-clothing~d~15/ (new site)...

We do plan to do that... it is just since we plan a soft launch we will essentially have 2 sites out there. We are wondering when to remove the noindex from the new site. We will have 2 sites for about a month... should we let the bots crawl the new site (new urls, same domain) only we we take down the old site and have the 301's or let Google crawl earlier to get the new site a head start on indexing.

We would drop the subdomain - so we would have 2 "Men's Clothing" department pages - different URLs, slightly different content...

But the URL structer is different... does that matter?

SInce all of the URLs except for the homepage - what do you think about letting the new site get crawled maybe 2 weeks before it is 100% launched? We would have some duplicate content issues but I am hoping this would give us a head start with the new site.... then when we go 100% we add the 301's and new sitemap. It is my understanding we will be dropping the sub domain for the soft launch.

Thank you so much!

So with the service - the new site is not crawled until we launch it?

The new site is beta.sierratradingpost.com where we will be dropping the beta. On the old one has catalog departments... ie Men's Classics, which, at this time, are not being carried over to the new site. I guess we are wonding when we should allow the robots to crawl the new site?

www.sierratradingpost.com

We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results.

The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites.

Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site.

What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues?

Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6

Thank You,

sincerely,

Stephan Woo Cude

SEO Specialist

scude@sierratradingpost.com