I am switching shopping cart providers, and I cannot keep the same URL's we've had for the past 10+ years.

[absoauto]

This applies to our product and category pages. What is the best way to limit the impact of this?

[MikeGracia]

I'd seriously look into 301 redirects.

How many products are we talking about and what is the current URL structure like?

The best way from an SEO, usability and revenue point of view would be to 301 URLS like-for-like - Sending domain.com/productabc.html to the same product on the new URL structure. This may be time consuming if you have 10's of thousands of URLS, but depending on the current structure you may be able to automate this at least a little.

So some questions:

What's the new structure

What's the old structure

How many products/categories/URLs?

[absoauto]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the response, the old structure was pretty flexible it's just "/productname.aspx " or really whatever keywords we wanted, but ending in .aspx.

The new structure is not as flexible, it is - "/productname-p/keyword.htm" and categories are "/categoryname/categoryIDnumber.htm"

So I don't think there's going to be anyway to automate this and we're looking at a few hundred products and a few dozen categories. Is there a downside to having that many 301 redirects?

[MikeGracia]

Hi Margaret,

Others may disagree perhaps but personally I'd say that 301'ing product to product, category to category is the way to go. From what I remember seeing a while back on the subject, Matt Cutts explained that it would be unwise to have too many 'hops' (e.g. 301 to 301 to 301 to 301...) but with redesigns etc doing a full product > product (page to page) redirect site-wide is fine.

At the end of the day it's best for the user!

re: the structure - with the new structure what is defining the 'keyword' part of the URL in '/productname-p/keyword.htm' ? You may be surprised what is possible in terms of automating (or at least semi-automating) things like bulk 301 redirects - especially if you can get the old URLs into an Excel file and manipulate them

I'd ask your digital agency (or whoever is doing the migration) if they can get their best Excel ninjas to have a chat with you about this.

At the absolute worst case, if there really is no way that this can be semi-automated, I'd say it's a job of a pot of coffee and some time with Excel open! A lot of the time though there is at least some automation that can be done in Excel.

[TakeshiYoung]

There is no limit to the number of 301 redirects a site can have. A few hundred pages is relatively small. Just make sure they are implemented properly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

[CDLAB]

Hi Margaret

301 redirects! I have just gone through the same process as you will be. You may find this blog post of use, Its simple and quick.

http://blog.search-mojo.com/2010/10/14/301-redirects-formatting-bulk-redirects-in-4-quick-steps/

Also checkout http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ which will help you also.