Changing shopping cart - lose positioning?

Hello,

Just a quick question here..

We have a site that has been around for a few years and has decent search engine positioning. We're currently using Miva 4.20 but want to switch to another cart that uses ASP.NET.

We have hundreds of categories, and pretty much every one is somewhere in the top 15 of search results.

Since the URLs will be different in the new cart, won't we lose our search engine positioning for each category and sub-category? Is there a way to make the move without losing it all?

Thanks!

You will not lose it necessarily, but it will change for sure... search engines surely notice that your site changed and rate it again based on the new information. However in fact, your website is constantly rated, since modern search engines consider also changes on other sites linking to yours for example (it is a complex rating network and no one really can say how a particular search engine works - otherwise it could be abused to push certain sites).

Anyway, I don't think that there will be a high impact on your site's rating. But cannot say this for sure (who can ?).

All in all if you feel that it could be an issue with the shop URLs (but I think more to customers having bookmarked such URLs), you may consider implementing URL redirections from the old URL schemes to the new ones.

If i were you I would identify among the current URLs which has backlinks from different domains, and which are responsible for the decent traffic. Redirect those one with 301 permanent to the new ones, and this will minimize the lost traffic.

You should brace yourself for a wild ride for the first week after changing. This will be when the search engines are re-evaluating your site. Sometimes you'll have excellent positioning and other times you'll be hard to find. After a couple days, things should begin to level out back to your baseline levels.

-BEC

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BasicECommerce

You should brace yourself for a wild ride for the first week after changing. This will be when the search engines are re-evaluating your site. Sometimes you'll have excellent positioning and other times you'll be hard to find. After a couple days, things should begin to level out back to your baseline levels.

-BEC

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Agree completely with this, its all a bit of guess work but if you already have good se positions then it shouldn't impact your new website too much.

You will also need to include an automatic 404 error message (page not found) redirect for those pages from your old shop that are no longer a part of your new one (different naming conventions etc)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by QuikShop

You will also need to include an automatic 404 error message (page not found) redirect for those pages from your old shop that are no longer a part of your new one (different naming conventions etc)

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Any reason why you would use a 404 as opposed to a 301 redirect? 404 errors will cause issues with SEO while 301 redirects keep the spiders moving throughout the site - not to mention the actual users. Current best practice is 301 redirects.

I'd love to hear your reasoning for choosing a 404 over a redirect because its not something I would've chosen. Please share your thoughts so we can discuss and learn.