IMPACTS on Moving Online Store to New Platform
-
I,
I have this online store, http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ built on osCommerce.
This platform is NOT SEO friendly and I expecting to move it to a new platform, probably, http://www.americommerce.com/
Can I limit the SEO impact when moving this store?
The domaine will be the same, but every other url on the site will change.
I only know the basics of SEO, and only copy html code when I need to. So my knowledge are limited.
Using Google Analytics, I have the most popular page url visit on the current store.
To limit impact, I thought I should copy the most popular page URL of the curent store and do a 301 redirect on the store platform.
Do you think this my limit the impact? Would there be a other way to limit SEO impact on Google search results?
I don't want to be penalize if the search and up on a 401 page.
Can anybody help me?
Thank you,
BigBlaze
-
This is a good idea to get a control over the pages...
Although i am no smart but in the beginning years i played a lot with osCommerce and i can simply say that is platform is not SEO fitted. Zen cart is even a better option but yes if you give me a open choice i will go for your option!
-
I agree. On my sites I use "buy buttons" on html pages instead of using the product pages that the cart can generate. This gives me total control over the look of the pages, the URLs and the SEO.
-
I have this kind of experience in the past and as per the best of my knowledge you have to be very planed before executing stuff or else you will see some not easily irrecoverable damages that will create a problem.
Here are few things that you should plan
- Plan the redirection
As you said your complete URL structure will be changed this means you have to create and excel sheet to note all your current URLs and set the new URLs in the next column and set 301s accordingly.
- Picking the right eCommerce Platform
This is critical, I have worked with Joomla (I hate it), Wordpress, osCommerce, Zencart and Magneto and I have a good time playing with Magneto and Zencart.
There are actually several things to plan before switching from one platform to other keeping SEO on the safe side!
The best advice is to heir a person with good SEO (eCommerce) experience and he can do the good job for you!
-
Moving an ecommerce site to a new platform can be a TON of work. It can also change how your site performs in the search engines.
You have decided that you can improve your SEO by moving to a new platform.
You want to maximize this by picking a platform that will perform well, optimizing it expertly and moving your pages in a way that retains all of their links and rankings.
Instead of fearing loss you should be aggressively looking for gain.
If I was in your situation I would hire an experienced SEO who knows a lot about ecommerce platforms and have him/her advise on a platform, plan the move, determine how to best optimize, and do parts of the execution that you don't feel qualified doing yourself.
This is an opportunity for you to make huge gains. A website gets very few of these opportunities. Maximize them.
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
-
Do Google Penalties Always Follow a Redirects to New Domains?
I have a couple sites that were penalized by Google for hosting content that made Google look bad. After a major newspaper showcased what was going on they suddenly took a major hit as if someone at Google flipped a switch and told their system not to rank the content for anything other than their brand names. The article made Google look bad because the newspaper highlighted a lot of unverified user generated accusations the reporters assumed not to be true in the context of "these accusations are mostly false, but they still show up on the first page when people search Google." I was thinking one way to fight this would simply be to host the content at a different domain, but I am concerned about the new domain being penalized as well. I don't want to completely shut down all of the original sites because some of them have brand recognition. The oldest domain is 12 years old with backlinks from several news outlets which is why the content ranked so well, but after the penalty that is only the case on Bing. I've read various articles about this tactic. Some say that you will almost always pass the penalty to the new domain if you do a 301 redirect, but the penalties at issue in those articles were for things like buying links or other black hat tactics. This is somewhat different in that I wasn't doing anything black hat, they just decided not to let the site rank for political reasons. I was hoping that maybe that type of penalty wouldn't follow it, but right now I am leaning towards simply creating a second site to syndicate articles. It will need to attribute the articles to their sources though, so they will need either no followed links or possibly a redirection script that bots cannot follow. I would really like it if I could simply change the first site to its .net or .org equivalent and 301 everything though.
Technical SEO | | PostAlmostAnything0 -
Several personal websites moving to one domain - 301 or 302?
I feel like I've thought about this so much that now I'm thinking in circles and can't figure this out, so I hope someone can help! We have a group of physicians who currently practice privately, but are going to become one entity with one website. However, they are going to look like sub-entities, if this makes sense - instead of every practice being "One Practice Medical Group" they'll be "Lakeside Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company," and then the other guy will be "Red Mountain Primary Care - A One Practice Medical Group Company" and so on for about a half dozen practices. They all have personal sites already, and many are concerned that they will lose any history for their personal sites and will not rank as well in Google as they do right now. One doctor really wants to keep his own site, and then just have a link on his profile page of the new entity's website. Isn't this counterproductive? Also, if we do redirect all the personal websites to the new entity's domain, it will pass any page rank they already have, correct? Should these be 301 redirects, or 302 redirects? None of the current sites really have a lot of "link juice" but we're working with several strong personalities who want the benefits of the big entity but the autonomy of a private practice.
Technical SEO | | RachelEm0 -
Delete or re-submit sitemaps for new products? How often?
When I add new products (approx. 10 a month), I usually delete the old sitemap and submit a new one. Is this ok to do, or should I just re-submit it with the new info included? Also, is once a month too much?
Technical SEO | | tiffany11030 -
How to transition a traditional site to app format with least amount of impact on SEO
My company is an e-commerce platform and within the last year have started working on app based websites. These are not apps that have to be downloaded but rather the site runs in the browser and is essentially one page of content. We have created an SEO layer that allows us to provide Google information as if there are individual pages. I'm looking for SEO advice on transitioning from what we call our vstores to an app store because the code specified by Google to use has shown to have negative impact on SEO rankings. While we have worked out many bugs and it has gotten better, just want to be doing everything I can to help any of our merchants that will be transitioning. Here are some of the specific issues I'm running into Duplicate Content merchants can have up to 3 stores running simultaneously with the same content just displayed slightly different
Technical SEO | | marketing_zoovy.com
ex. sportsworldchicago.com, app.sportsworldchicagocom, m.sportsworldchicago.com a) What is the best way to control having the content be associated with the main domain
b) Should they be submitting all the sites to google for indexing, I only wanted sitemap submitted for the main domain
c) our end goal will be for the app. to just be the main site Loading issues, our apps essentially have a loading message. I think sometimes this is picked up as an ISE or timeout error for Google and other SERPS. I think it is also contributing to a higher site abandonment. We have changed an used different loading page messages, but have yet to find one I feel is a KEEPER. ex. site TheGrillLife.com - this one does not show the site in the background while loading. On other sites we have the site shown in the background while it loads. This is what is showing as indexed for the homepage, currently working with my tech team on it: The Grill Life <cite style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">www.thegrilllife.com/</cite> issue: API request failure (likely an ISE). uri: http://www.thegrilllife.com/. _cmd: appReviewsList. domain: www.thegrilllife.com. release: 201314|20130619133400. For e-commerce sites do you think the product content on category and sub-category pages is enough for Google or other search engines to determine relevancy for indexing. In some of the transitions content is being removed due to an effort to transition to a cleaner and faster design and layout. Thanks for any advice or suggestions in advance. Christy0 -
Hard-working newbie question: benefit of moving my blog to my online store's domain?
Hi all, I've been running an online wine store in Switzerland for a month and have been working hard on SEO (I love learning about it). Anyway, for a couple of years prior to launching the store, I had been running a wine blog whose articles are ranking well in Google. I now want to link the two. My questions are: A) will the addition of the blog (store.com/blog) contribute to the store's domain authority (currently, the blog authority is higher than the site authority)? B) technically, can I 301 the whole blog to store.com/blog? Any help and tips would be appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | fkupfer0 -
What needs to be done to tell google my site has moved /changed
Hi everyone, I have a site, which I have re-built on a temporary domain, so that my main ecommerce site can still run.. I have noticed that google has already crawled my temporary domain. The only problem is I now want to transfer the new site back onto its proper domain (www.ourbrand.com). I have changed some of the URL structures of the new site so realize I will need to do re-directs relating to the same domain, but will google get confused that another domain used to have my new website on? I don't plan on using the old temporary domain again and wondered if I need to tell google in some way it was used just to build my site on? Michelle
Technical SEO | | nutjobshell0 -
Very well established blog, new posts now being indexed very late
I have an established blog.We update it on daily basis. In the past, when I would publish a new post, it would get indexed within a minute or so. But since a month or so, its taking hours. Sometimes like 10-12 hours for new posts to get indexed. Only thing I have changed is robots.txt. This is the current robots file. User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /*wp-login.php* Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /feed Disallow: /comments Disallow: /author Disallow: /category Disallow: */trackback Disallow: */feed Disallow: */comments Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /wget/ Disallow: /httpd/ Disallow: /*.php$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*.js$ Disallow: /*.inc$ Disallow: /*.css$ Disallow: /*.gz$ Disallow: /*.wmv$ Disallow: /*.cgi$ Disallow: /*.xhtml$ Disallow: /*?* Disallow: /*? Allow: /wp-content/uploads User-agent: TechnoratiBot/8.1 Disallow: # ia_archiver User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / # disable duggmirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: / # allow google image bot to search all images User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /wp-includes/ Allow: /* # allow adsense bot on entire site User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Allow: /* Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.gz Site has tons of backlinks. Just wondering if something is wrong with the robots file or if it could be something else.
Technical SEO | | rookie1230