Help changing category and page titles on established Magento site.

[TrulyLuna]

Hi All,

This is my first post, I've been a Pro member for a while now, read many posts but have never asked a question here.

I have an established Magento site that I need to do a lot of SEO work on. I am a newbie at SEO, so I wanted to ask for advice here.

I just changed one of the category names, the url, meta title, and meta description. When making the change I selected the checkbox in the Magento backend that says "Create Permanent Redirect for Old URL"

Example:
Old Category: http://www.domain.com/old-category-name.html
New Category: http://www.domain.com/new-category-name.html

Everything worked fine with the exception of one alarming thing... I lost all of the page authority for the category itself and all of the sub categories and pages below it.  Now the category and all pages below it show (on the moz toolbar) a PA of 1 and 0 links and 0 domains.

I updated the sitemap.  I did not do a 301 redirect in the .htaccess, I only chose the option to redirect on the Magento backend when changing the name and url of the category.

I need to change a lot of other category and page names and urls but now I'm a bit gun shy, as I do not want to do something that will damage what little page rank I have at the moment.

I'm looking for some advice from one of you guys who might be able to help me do this the correct way.  I did some research on Google, but I'm still not sure of the correct method to accomplish this.

Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer.

[Keszi]

Hi there,

My question is: when did you do this change? As far as I know the Linkscape update was yesterday, so it might take a month until the next update, so you will see the "changes" done.

Mozzers, correct me if I am wrong.

Gr.,

Istvan

[TrulyLuna]

Thanks for the reply!

So what you are saying is that this is nothing to worry about from a Google page rank perspective?  I see how it could affect external pages anchor text links back to the pages on my site, but they will redirect fine, I just won't receive as much love from Google since the anchor text does not match the new page name that I made the changes to.

So, basically what you're saying is that this is nothing to worry about as long as things are linked properly and redirecting.

Thanks again for your reply.

[Keszi]

Every big change you make on a website can cause fluctuation in the rankings. That's all normal.

But if you have done it properly, you shouldn't worry about it, it will come back up.

Gr.,

Istvan

[TrulyLuna]

Thanks again, and by the way... I made the changes yesterday.

I just thought I would check with someone who knows more than me before I start making a lot of changes that could damage my site.

Thanks for the info, makes sense that what I am seeing is likely due to Linkscape not knowing about the change that I made.

[KeriMorgret]

A bit late with an answer here, but yes, Istvan is correct. The next Linkscape update is April 10th, so you should see changes then!