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
-
On our site by mistake some wrong links were entered and google crawled them. We have fixed those links. But they still show up in Not Found Errors. Should we just mark them as fixed? Or what is the best way to deal with them?
Some parameter was not sent. So the link was read as : null/city, null/country instead cityname/city
Technical SEO | | Lybrate06060 -
Discontinued Product on a Ecommerce site
To create a better customer experience, rather then remove discontinued product from a site, we remove many links from the page, and remove it from the navigation of the site, but we keep the url and show that the product can no longer be purchased. This keeps the links, keeps the content, and gives customers the opportunity to find other products we have. But I often wonder if we should allow this items to just 404 and be done with them. Here is an example. http://www.americanmusical.com/Item--i-dyn-bm5a-list. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Googlebot cannot access your site
"At the end of July I received a message in my Google webmaster tools saying "Googlebot can't access your site" We checked our robots.txt file and removed a line break in it, and then I had Google Fetch the file again. I have not received any more messages since then. When we created the website I wrote all of the content and optimized each page for about 1 local keyword. A few weeks after I checked my keywords and did have a few on the first page of google. Since then almost all of them have completely disappeared. Because we had not link building effort I would not expect to still be on the first page, but I should definitely be seeing them before the 5th or even 10th page of Google. The address is http://www.tile-pompanobeach.com I'm not sure if these horrible results have something to do with the message from Google or something else. The problem is this client now wants to sign a contract with us for SEO and I really have no Idea what happened and if I will be able to figure it out. The main keyword for my home page is tile pompano beach and I aslo was using Pompano Beach Tile store for the About page which was previously on the first page of Google. Does anyone have some input?
Technical SEO | | DTOSI0 -
301 redirecting a mobile site.
Is it possible to selectively 301 redirect mobile/tablet user agents and google robots from the desktop version of a website to a mobile site? Would this preserve the SEO for the desktop website while optimizing the mobile/tablet site for mobile SEO?
Technical SEO | | inc.com0 -
Best way to setup large site for multi language
Hello, I am setting up a new site which is going to be very large, over 250,000 products. Most of our customers are in the UK (45%), the rest are from various European countries and the USA. Unfortunately we only have a team of two people writing content for these pages in English. I would value some input on the best way to setup my website structure for ranking. Obviously the best would be individual country oriented domains I.e. domain.fr domain.de domain.co.uk . However we wouldnt have the time to create content for every page and most pages would contain the same content as the English domain. Would I get a penalty for this from google? The second choice is to follow the example of overstock.com and pull in information relating to each country I.e. currency and delivery time. this would be a lot easier but I am concerned that the lack of geo focus would effect my rankings. Does any one have any ideas?
Technical SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Pros & Cons of deindexing a site prior to launch of a new site on the same domain.
If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site? Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web. Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page. I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the new site initially. I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.
Technical SEO | | medtouch0 -
Traffic drop after migration?
Hi everybody. One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas. I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that? Your thoughts would be great! S
Technical SEO | | neooptic0