Will Moving Categories Affect SEO

[robbieire]

I recently designed a new website to replace an old site. We managed to hold 90% ranking and traffic by keeping the same URS's and content.

Now that we have completed that we are now updating the whole site. It is an commerce website. Some of the items we were selling we are getting from a new vendor. If I move these products from one one vendor to another will this affect SEO?

Here is an example. I have a product called "Green Zipper Sweater". This product is Anchored via Manufacturer and Category. The URL and Title Tag are  green-zipper-sweater. If the Sweater was made by "Nike Green Sweaters" and our new supplier is "Gap Yellow and Green Sweaters". If I change the the Manufacturer and now put it under "Gap Green and Yellow Sweaters" will this affect my ranking.

We are continuing to stock products from the original supplier "Nike Green Sweaters" and we have an aggressive SEO plan and are ranking very well for "Nike Green Sweaters". We also have good product ranking so "Green Zipper Sweater" brings us a lot of traffic. I want to be sure I do not loose ranking for  the product page "Green Zipper Sweater" and the Brand "Nike Green Sweaters"

Any advice would be appreciated.

[wearehappymedia]

Is the permalink / URL changing for the product?

[robbieire]

No they will be staying the same.

[Andy-Halliday]

if i understand the question correctly and you are changing manufacturer. You have the potential to lose traffic as your page will no longer contain the text 'old manufacture name', so therefore wont rank for it this term.

If your urls aren't changing you shouldn't lose to as much visibility as any links etc pointing here will still be valid.

The only area where you could lose visibility is in the old manufacturers name if this had more search volume that the new manufacturer.

[Netrepid]

FWIW, here's how I would attack this problem with SEO and internet marketing in mind:

1. Add your new manufacturer as a separate entity/category... don't change the name of the existing category.
2. When your inventory for the old manufacturer is sold through, build a separate landing page for that manufacturer. (ie domain.com/nike-green-sweaters)
3. 301 redirect all of your former Nike green sweater inventory URLs and category page URLs to the new landing page /nike-green-sweaters/
4. On /nike-green-sweaters/, include a transparent blurb informing potential customers that you no longer carry those products, but your store now proudly provides Gap Green Sweaters - or whatever the new product is (Gap green zipper sweater, green zipper sweater, etc.).
5. Anchor text link in-content to your new manufacturer category with the highest volume, short tail keyword.
6. Include maybe 2-4 more top products from that new manufacturer, and link to those pages with keyword rich anchors, too.
7. BONUS: include an Amazon affiliate link or something similar to another retailer who sells the former product on that page, too - so at least if you refer some sales for the old product through your page, you can make something back for it!

Hope this is helpful. Good luck!

[Wasabihound]

Hi

If you're URL / permalink is not changing than in theory all the off-page SEO for the page will be unaffected since the page still exists. So external link juice still has some where to go (to coin a phrase). But beware of the anchor text of the link (well be aware) - more about this below:

Andy makes a good point in that if you are changing manufacturer than most likely some of the text will change ( obviously "Nike" changes to "Gap" for example). So from an on-page SEO perspective the page has changed and this might affect how well the particular page ranks for "Nike Green Sweater" since quite obviously that particular page is no longer about Nike Green Sweaters and assuming the search engine bot is doing its job it will work this out and adjust indexing for that brand specific keyword combination.

To deal with that potential problem, I would suggest adding a link to the Nike Green Sweater page on the Gap Green Sweater page - you can do this quite naturally by adding a "related products" link or "people who bought this also bought" or "looking for Nike Green Sweater?" (for example).

This passes some of the link juice for your page to the Nike Green Sweater page.

Helping Nike Green Sweater Wearers...or Another Reason for an Internal Link:

Creating an internal link to the Nike Green Sweater page also helps people who came to your site through a link that explicitly referred to "Nike Green Sweaters" and were looking for "Nike Green Sweaters". (You could use a tool like AHREFs or Google Webmaster or Open Site Explorer to find the anchor text being used by people externally linking to you to get a sense of the scale of this "problem". )