Retaining SEO value when changing the shopping cart software
-
I am looking into purchasing an existing ecommerce site with high SEO rankings. However, the site is old and beyond outdated. The shopping cart would need to be updated (say, to Magento). However, an updated shopping cart will force a change in the URLs (from example.com/category.asp to example.com/category). Will the SEO value be lost? Does anyone have any experience with this issue? There is a significant amount of money for me at stake so I would really appreciate to hear your experiences in this matter.
-
After implementation, I saw ranks improve, decrease and being the same.
The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Filv4pP-1nw. So a small decay may occur resulting in a different rank.
On a second note, what happens many times is that the 301 redirect goes to a page that has more/less content, different template and so on as the original landing page. Since the content is different, the position in the serps may go up/down in organics (this happens even if the page is the same as a competitor's page may become more relevant for a query based on algo changes, content changes and so on).
The most successful migrations are the ones that have the majority of the pages 301 to a landing page that is roughly the same (all other things being implemented properly). Key is planning.
It's stressful, but feels great when implemented properly. Good luck!
-
Your safest route would be to either 1)patch up the current cart to not appear outdated to your customers or 2) find a different shopping cart system that uses the same example.com/category.asp format for it's URL's.
Patching up what is already working will be the least expensive route...
-
sounds good - have you ever had any direct experience with this?
I have noticed with SEO moves that some times even though things are executed properly, they can still not work out as promised.
-
If you do a proper migration, should not hurt your rankings much. Make sure you properly redirect your links (301's) and review the various checklists (planning is the key). After implementation, carefully watch analytics and fix any issues.
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
SEO implications of changing Date/Time format on website
Looking for some advice on an area that I can't seem to find much research about online. Since starting our website, it's always been hosted in the UK and targeting UK visitors. That means we always had the date/time format of the website as DD.MM.YY for example. We've now changed business focus and are targeting US visitors. We recently moved the site over to US hosting, and our web developers have instructed that we change to US date/time format (MM.DD.YY). My question is, are there any implications on doing this from an SEO perspective? Obviously, all our historic blog posts will need to have their date updated from, for example, 9 July to July 9. Does this make any difference at all? Anyone got any insights as to what best practice with this is? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteratS20 -
I am looking for an SEO strategy
I am looking for an SEO strategy, a step by step procedure to follow to rank my website https://infinitelabz.com . Can somebody help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KHsdhkfn0 -
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
Internal Linking for better seo
On our site http://villasdiani.com we have a blog called Kenya news, which is a category where we regular post articles. I am always creating external links to the category Kenya news so as it would pass juice to the posts in it and the posts have back links to category. There are no internal links among posts in the category. As our main target is to rent beach villas and boutique hotels, each of that posts in the category Kenya news has only a link either to category with beach villas or to category with boutique hotels. My question is, if this is good practice?, is it just not too much links going to categories to beach villas and boutique hotels form the Kenya news?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca1
Thank you very much for any thoughts Iris0 -
Multinational SEO
Hi all The situation: We have a .com website that is the core of our business over the last 3 years we have built this into a very sucessful brand. Customers are able to purchase products from our website and have it delivered anywhere in the world. As part of the development of our business we want to obviously rank high within serps regardless of what country our potential customer is from. We understand that we will need to translate much of our website to achieve this and that is something that we have in the pipeline. My question is more aimed at the English speaking countries and how we should optimise our website for these. For example: websitename.com.au and websitename.co.uk were initialy setup as 301 redirects to websitename.com, however, we have now set them up as their own domains which display the exact same content as the .com website. So to clarify the content on websitename.com/product1.html is also on websitename.com.au/product1.html and websitename.co.uk/product1.html What would the best way to ensure that our .com.au and .co.uk gain traction within the appropriate country? Is duplicate content still an issue? All our prices are displayed in USD will this go againts? We use US English (with a sprinkle of chinglish) as our websites copy languange should we change spelling for AU and UK? Does anyone have any case studies and or other reports I can read that may help me find the right solution for us. Thanks Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyCarter0 -
Social Media and SEO
What is best? Increasing DA and PA on a specific social media profile such as twitter or spreading out the DA and PA on a variety of different profiles?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Is this Domain Change Worthwhile?
Hi- I have a client who has setup a new criminal law firm in the last few months. The URL is like: www.somenamelawyers.com ['somename' is the same # characters as their company name] I have run a successful AdWords a/c for them and many of the big traffic and conversion keywords include 'criminal lawyers'. From a SEO perspective, the long goal is to get traffic for 'criminal lawyers' and keywords that phrase match that. So I am considering migrating them to www.somenamecriminallawyers.com. I have researched this issue and understand the technicalities involved in moving. My question here is 'is this change worthwhile'. I think it is worthwhile because it really is in a sense rebranding them to be more clearly in a specific business domain, ie. criminal law. Also, they are a new outfit so they don't have a lot of backlinks yet. And mainly, they will get a SEO boost to their core keywords 'criminal lawyers'. Thanks in advance for your thoughts- Jules
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Juller0