Ecommerce replatforming and redirects - how much traffic will I lose?
-
Hey there,I'm looking to hear your experiences in regards to replatforming an ecommerce store and SEO impacts.My company is analyzing the impacts of switching from Magento Entreprise to Shopify Plus. Some background info :
- 900k sessions / month
- 52% of sessions coming from SEO
- Multilingual store : half of traffic is French, half is English
- 945 domains linking to us, according to search console
- Competitive industry (retail)
Moving to Shopify would force us to do two things:
- Redirect all category pages, brand pages and product pages. Shopify forces a specific URL structure for these pages that is different from our current one.
- Redirect the English section of the site to a subdomain (https://en.example.com/...). Have multiple stores on Shopify can't be done on the same domain.
I'm especially afraid of the impact of moving the English section to a subdomain. I feel it would lose most of the domain authority - most backlinks go to the website root so very few will be redirected to the subdomain.Even if we spend a lot of time doing redirections, do you think the traffic will significantly suffer? Do you have stats to share on a similar migration you would have done, or other insights?Thanks a lot!
-
For Ecommerce, we use different strategies of SEO. I have published articles related to eCommerce marketing with Shopify and Magento, which you can read here.
-
Hey Sean,
We're not only looking at it from an SEO or infra perspective but for website redesign as well. Thank you for your comment.
-
Hey Nigel,
Thank you for your comment and insights on your experience!
We are looking at changing the platform because we need to reinvest massively anyways (we'll move from Magento 1 to Magento 2 otherwise), but I was curious to get exactly this type of feedback to see what could be the implications.
Greatly appreciated,
Charles -
Hi Cheedbe
The very thought of you doing this is mind-numbing. Magneto is a far more configurable than Shopify so stay where you are. If things are not going the way you want then get a better Magento developer working on the site.
The move will cause a huge jolt in traffic that you don't need.
All those redirects will have to be done manually for all product and brand pages but possibly all sorts, filters and brand/category combinations. Each redirect could cause a 15% drop in traffic depending on who you listen to and that's after all the time it will take Google to reindex everything!
It makes sense to separate English and French directories but I would do it on the platform you are on. Use hreflang to point to the two variations. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
We moved from a bespoke platform to Visalsoft and immediately lost 40% of traffic. It took so long to get it back and in the end, we gave up and the company folded. It wasn't the only reason but the drop in traffic and associated turnover was a major factor.
Regards
Nigel
-
900k sessions a month? Completely outside of the spectrum of SEO entirely, moving yer site to Shopify is a horrible idea. I think 4 gig ram stick, dual core intel i7, 120gig+ SSD Virtual Private Server with ubuntu 16.04 install would probably be the thing to move to. 0 downtime 0 impact SEO, keep the same site url structure, shouldn't take a pro more than 2 hours from fresh VPS to site fully xfered and running better than you've ever seen it ran before.
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
-
Navigation Menu - Whats too much
Ive always had pages set up for a lot of our products and had these in the navigation menu. For instance we sell Solar Control Window Film which helps with heat, glare and UV. We then have a navigation menu something like this: Solar Window Film
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fozzy1609
Heat Control window Films
Anti glare window film
UV window film
etc etc Ihave this for all my services and products. I have unique content on each. My question is this. Would I be better having the naviation menu with links to all the seperate services we offer
OR
Should I have it linking to the main services and then the related services from within the page> For example Ill have just Solar Window Film in the navigation and then on the page it would internally link to the heat related section and the glare related section etc. Im wondering whether my sub pages would suffer because theyre not linked to from every page with the second method or whether it would help in some way0 -
Would you rate-control Googlebot? How much crawling is too much crawling?
One of our sites is very large - over 500M pages. Google has indexed 1/8th of the site - and they tend to crawl between 800k and 1M pages per day. A few times a year, Google will significantly increase their crawl rate - overnight hitting 2M pages per day or more. This creates big problems for us, because at 1M pages per day Google is consuming 70% of our API capacity, and the API overall is at 90% capacity. At 2M pages per day, 20% of our page requests are 500 errors. I've lobbied for an investment / overhaul of the API configuration to allow for more Google bandwidth without compromising user experience. My tech team counters that it's a wasted investment - as Google will crawl to our capacity whatever that capacity is. Questions to Enterprise SEOs: *Is there any validity to the tech team's claim? I thought Google's crawl rate was based on a combination of PageRank and the frequency of page updates. This indicates there is some upper limit - which we perhaps haven't reached - but which would stabilize once reached. *We've asked Google to rate-limit our crawl rate in the past. Is that harmful? I've always looked at a robust crawl rate as a good problem to have. Is 1.5M Googlebot API calls a day desirable, or something any reasonable Enterprise SEO would seek to throttle back? *What about setting a longer refresh rate in the sitemaps? Would that reduce the daily crawl demand? We could set increase it to a month, but at 500M pages Google could still have a ball at the 2M pages/day rate. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lzhao0 -
How do i fix temporary redirects from Volusion?
I have around 20 temporary redirects that i can not really change. they look like this: http://www.bestfitbybrazil.com/reviewhelpful.asp?ProductCode=PANT+PA4069GRAFFITI&ID=17&yes=yes/login.asp See attached As you can see they are from LOGIN.ASP. This are system calls. I think the last thing I tried was blocking them in my robottxt file. but it doesn't seem to make a difference. Am I being effected by these redirects? How will Google look at them? QmiQcD6
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
301 redirects within same domain
If I 301 redirects all urls from http://domain.com/folder/keyword to http://domain.com/folder/keyword.htm Are new urls likely to keep most of link juicy from source url and maintain the rankings in SERP?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bull1350 -
Some badges will be sitewide, is that OK
Hello, We are making badges to hand out to our alumni. Some of these links backs are probably going to be sitewide. Is this tactic still good with respect to the recent G updates? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to conduct catch 301 redirects & have the separate 301 redirects for the key pages
Hi, We've currently done a site migration mapping and 301 redirecting only the sites key pages. However two GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is picking a massive amount of 404 areas and there has been some drop in rankings. I want to mitigate the site from further decline, and hence thought about doing a catch 301 - that is 301 redirecting the remaining pages found on the old site back to the home page, with the future aim of going through each URL one by one to redirect them to the page which is most relevant. Two questions, (1) can I do a catch 301 and if so what is the process and requirements that I have to give to the developer? (2) How do you reduce the number of increasing 404 errors from a site, despite doing 301 redirects and updating links on external linking sites. Note: The server is apache and the site is hosted on Wordpress platform. Regards, Vahe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vahe.Arabian0 -
2-stage 301 redirects
Dear colleagues, I have quite an unusual situation with one of my client's websites, and I could use an advise from someone who experienced the same circumstances: They are currently planning on launching a new site under the same domain (by September), when several key current pages are intended to be replaced with new equivalent pages under new URLs. So far it's pretty simple, BUT - due to a merger with another company they will be migrating their entire website to a different domain within a year. My question is - what would be the optimal solution for redirects? We are considering a 301 from the current pages to the new pages under the same domain, and once the new domain is activated - aside from defining 301 redirects from the new pages under the same domain to the new domain, we will cancel the original 301 from the old pages to the new pages on the same domain, and instead define new 301 for those pages to the new domain. What do you think? Is there a better solution - like using 302 redirects for the first stage? Has anyone tried such a procedure? Your input will be highly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Omer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Usearch0 -
Quoestion about 301 redirect
Hey, I have interesting questions regardin 301 redirect (At least I think it's Interesting:) ) So i have this websites that compares different lenders, url below 🙂 If you go to the homepage then the first thing you see is different loan amounts in 50-99 euro range. Also you can check out different loan amounts like 100-149€, 150-199€, 200-249€ and so on. For now i have used 301 redirect and Noindex and Nofollow for all the different "loan amounts" urls. Examples below etc Is it a good idea to use 301 on all such pages to point to the homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0