What is the most effective way to migrate an ecommerce site?

[BenRWoodard]

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?

[Highland]

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!

[EugeneF]

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.

[BenRWoodard]

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.

[EugeneF]

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.

[MulberrySqCraig]

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.