SEO Migration / Transition from Current Platform. Have Experience?
-
We're currently about to make the switch from one commerce platform to another (volusion to magento,) and wondering if anyone here, at all, has any experience with having a site for a few years and then switching platforms.
How did the engines react? What did you do? Time frame for things that happened, etc...would love some feedback and input on your story if you've migrated platforms.
Thanks
-
Like Brad said, just try to retain the URL structures as much as possible unless you are really aiming to make it more seo friendly.
Do the migration quickly and make sure to minimise broken pages.
It'll usually affect your rankings, but you'll recover. Just do cleanup quickly and have your linking plan ready
-
Paul, this is something I have experienced a lot... there are many blogs who claims that good planning on platform migration can help you stay away from the loss of search engine traffic as well as rankings but I think migration is going to give a temporary effect on rankings and traffic and bad planning can make it preeminent.
Here are the following things you should keep in mind before you are starting to migrate a platform from one ecommerce platform to another.
- Make sure that the next ecommerce should have all the necessary SEO plug-ins installed that you will need to make your website look good to search engines as well as users.
- Make sure to do a proper 301 redirection on pages and on category and product level. Any mistakes will results as a ranking loss from the search engines.
- Try to keep the URLs same as possible so that redirect should not be needed
Try to update xml site map and webmaster tool about the change so that Google can track and re crawl the pages accordingly.
Let me assure you again that this might produce a negative impact on rankings and traffic for a short period of time but as soon as the pages started to crawl it will get fixed accordingly.
Hope this helps!
-
I've gone through this many times. Here are some high level points to consider.
1. Keep as much of the content the same as possible
2. Keep as many urls the same as possible
3. Be sure you have managed your potential 404 errors prior to launch
Many times people just accept that some new commerce platform uses a different url structure for products (as an example). I personally don't accept that answer from the dev team on the surface. If I have 5000 product pages then I'm not really interested in changing that URL structure unless it is ABSOLUTELY necessary. Sure, 301's work great but if you are trying to minimize potential downsides it would be better to not have to place 5000 301s.
I'd recommend considering content that isn't moving over. Have you done your homework on how much of it is getting traffic? Or, is everything moving over? When I switch platforms the goal for my teams is to make the switch in a way that the average user would never know. Google certainly will know when you have gone from volusion to magento but making it less noticeable to users is important. It is difficult enough to switch platforms so you don't really want to bring new potential CRO issues into the conversation.
I saw a person on here yesterday that had 10,000 404 errors after the switch. To me this is just poor planning. You should not have to wait for webmaster tools to tell you there is a 404 problem. Google has a history of penalizing sites that are inaccessible or have a large number of 404 errors for even a brief period of time. I had a blog that I purchased and switched the PHP handler on. After 3 weeks I realized that every post was getting 404 errors. I fixed the issue but never got back 1/2 the traffic I lost.
All in all, Google does a fantastic job of handling your changes. If your titles, content, and urls are the same for your main traffic pages then you should expect it to be a fairly seamless transition. Hope this helps.
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
-
Migration to a new domain
Hi everyone, So i have one project where I'm planning to move current content on new domain, two reasons: 1. It seems current domain has some google penalty (backlink related, not manual) 2. Client wants rebranding and already has domain with new brand name. So as content is high quality and there is no content related penalty from google, what would be the best way to migrate existing content without passing any penalty AND without Google treating it as duplicate content. If i do 301 i suspect any penalty there is might follow, if i just copy existing content it won't be original content, what is the best solution here? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joelsemy0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Magento SEO firm
I'm looking for an SEO company that has substantial experience with the Magento shopping cart system. I've gone thru MOZ.com's Recommended List but I'm unsure of who specializes in Magento. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UncleXYZ0 -
Should I change .html to / ?
On my ecommerce site, we have .html extensions on all files and categories. I was wondering if it is worth the development cost to make all of them / ? Is there any SEO benefit in doing so? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How to be a good SEO optimizer while competing with a good ranked Bad SEO optimizer?
My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiddleEastSeo0 -
One platform, multiple niche sites: Worth $60/mo so each site has different class C?
Howdy all, The short of it is that I currently run a very niche business directory/review website and am in the process of expanding the system to support running multiple sites out of the same database/codebase. In a normal setup I'd just run all the sites off of the same server with all of them sharing a single IP address, but thanks to the wonders of the cloud, it would be fairly simple for me to run each site on it's own server at a cost of about $60/mo/site giving each site a unique IP on a unique c-block (in many cases a unique a-block even.) The ultimate goal here is to leverage the authority I've built up for the one site I currently run to help grow the next site I launch, and repeat the process. The question is: Is the SEO-value that the sites can pass to each other worth the extra cost and management overhead? I've gotten conflicting answers on this topic from multiple people I consider pretty smart so I'd love to know what other people say.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qurve0 -
What are the most underrated SEO tactics?
Looking over the discussion of underrated SEO tactics at http://sphinn.com/story/178993/ , I'm curious if folks here have any favorite SEO tactics that they feel are ignored, underrated, or somehow not appreciated by the community at large. Any thoughts? Among the tactics listed in the Sphinn post: Blog commenting Analytics to identify low-hanging keyword fruit Getting your site set up properly at the server level Unique and relevant imagery Internal links Google Place page optimization Several more... Any others that should be included? I'd personally add segmenting your keyword traffic into trademark (those that mention your brand name) versus non-trademark segments for more thorough analysis.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcolman2 -
Do interstitials hurt SEO?
If you go to www.homeportfolio.com and click on one of the links in the footer. you'll notice you are presented with an interstitial. Can you tell me if that hurts our SEO and if we lose any link juice or suffer in any other way as a result of this linking method? my main concern is whether having anchor text that says "bathroom ideas" that goes to an interstitial that doesn't mention bathroom ideas is non-relevant... even if it refreshes 12 seconds to a page that is.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaplanSEM0