Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site

[MyFairyTaleBooks]

Hi Guys,

I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense

I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format.

Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact.

How would you guys handle this?

Thanks,

Dinesh

[Jinx14678]

That is tough, it is hard for me to say 301 cause of course you could loose rankings, but you could loose rankings in a re-design in general if precautions are not taken.

If you were an SEO, I would most definitely say 301 because you could work with any negative effects and chalk them up to "growing pains" but with little SEO knowledge I am afraid you could make a detrimental change that seems insignificant.

I am not trying to scare you into not doing it, I would ALWAYS suggest moving to a cleaner URL structure for MANY reasons not just applicable to search engines.

But this is a tough one, as there is risk, but of course not a HUGE amount of risk, but risk none the less......

[MyFairyTaleBooks]

Hi Shane,

I guess I should clarify. I am not a SEO by trade but have been working with SEO since we launched this site back in 2010 and have learned on the job.

Understood about the re-design trust me I am working to keep all the elements as close to the same as possible (Meta Tags, Rel's, Descriptions, ALTS etc...)

I can do the 301 Redirect (from a technical perspective) I was curious to the impact it would have on search. I read a Rand post on when he moved to moz.com with 301's in place it had a negative impact on SERP, he recovered but that could be because of his authority you know?

[Jinx14678]

If you do everything by the "books" then you should not see a huge swing, I just did this with a few sites, but I took some pre and post social precautions which I believe actually helped me in both these, but of course I cannot say that for sure, as overall in both very recent examples I moved to better servers, better code structure, nav structure and other items - So I would still caution and say it is always a possibility to loose some rankings, but it really depends on your end game and end goals.