Shopping cart migration questions, SEO concerns?

[George.Fanucci]

Fellow Mozzers,

While doing an SEO assessment to prepare for migrating an e-commerce website from one shopping cart platform to another, many questions arise. The old site is being ported to a new platform, and testing can soon begin. Meanwhile, trying to predict or understand how Google will react to this site migration, before going live, and head off or correct problems before they occur.

What SEO tools can help to do a website audit, to compare two equivalent sites, the live site and the test site? (URLs, keywords, page titles, meta descriptions, etc.)

Background from SEO perspective

The website is about 10 years old, and has had only minor changes in the past few years.

There are over 10,000 inbound links from over 500 domains.

Nearly 80% of the traffic comes from search, and only 20% is paid search, so 60% is organic.

About 80% of the visitors are new, and 20% returning.

The present conversion rate is low, below 3%.

There are over 20,000 visitors per month on the average, with some cyclical, seasonal variations, spring and fall peaks.

There are about 20 pages that receive 60% and 100 pages that receive 98% of all the site entrances, with over 1,000 pages on the site. There are over 200 products in about 30 sub-categories.

There are also about 100 landing pages accounting for 98% of all the referral traffic, and all those URLs will have 301 redirects on the new platform.

Old site was PHP based, new site is ASP.NET based dynamic web pages. The new URLs will be quite different from the old URLs due to platform differences.

SEO Questions for Migration —— Keywords and URLs?

Besides concerns for keywords in HTML Page Titles, Meta Description. HTML Headings, IMG tags, internal-link anchor text, and page content itself, how important will the URL keywords be? Are keywords in URLs still important?

Are keywords in URL Parameters after the ? (new site, asp.net) considered as valuable as keywords in URLs (old site, php) or not?

Some examples:

old-site:

www.storebrandname.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html

new-site:

www.storebrandname.com/default.aspx?keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

i.e.

www.storebrandname.com/default.aspx?keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

For about 20% of the top 100 pages there are other kinds of URLs, such as:

/keyword1-keyword2-keywpord3.html
becomes
/category/keyword/Default.aspx
or
/category/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3/Default.aspx

also

/brandname-productname-keyword1-keyword2.html
becomes
/product/brandname-productname-keyword1-keyword2/Default.aspx

i.e. old URL file names, in effect, become new URL sub-directory names, within a subdirectory.

The new shopping cart uses /product/ and /category/ subdirectories whilst the old one did not.

Can you describe any (good or bad) experiences with shopping cart migrations, or speak to any of these specific concerns regarding keywords and URLs?

Can you make any predictions about how Google will respond to the new URL structure?

Any other concerns or tips about shopping cart migrations?

Thanks!

[Felip3]

1 - You have to do 301 redirect so you don't lose your organic traffic. Basically tell google where you moved each page.

2 - This URL is less SEO Friendly: www.storebrandname.com/default.aspx?keyword1 than your older URL.

[George.Fanucci]

Yes, we have 301 redirects ready for the top 100 pages that bring us over 97% of our traffic and our inbound links.

However, I have concerns about the page content. Since the site navigation and architecture is very different between the old and new backend, what will Google do if page content changes?

My thinking is, the content must be as good or better than the old site, otherwise Google will not look favorably on the new website.

How important are keywords in URLs vs. keywords in page content text, HTML headings, Meta Descriptions, IMG tags, internal link anchor text, etc...

[Felip3]

Uglier  URLs is not the end of the world, I personally was able to rank clients websites with very ugly URL like, site.com/238313

However once your new site is under development why don't take the time and implement the clean url? I'm a sure a clean url will help with SEO and also is much better for usability.