Best E commerce Platform for SEO / Flexibility

[David-Kley]

Greetings fellow Mozzers! Wanted to run this one by you:

We have a client that currently has 3 separate sites. The largest two contain about 1700-3000 products and URLs, with multiple categories and subpages. The smallest has approx 500 items, and URLs.

Currently all stores use 3dCart, which is a nice system, but doing optimization on the backend is very time consuming due to how they lay it out. Also each site has an adwords campaign, that has hundreds of unique ads for multiple products.

The owner has requested that we move all sites into one, and under one roof. This would work well, as each item is related to the same industry, serving its own niche. Think of a tire store that sells car tires, truck tires and motorcycle tires. The key product tying them all together is "Tires" He doesn't sell tires, but its the same type of format.

WE have been thinking of moving him away from 3dcart, due to how it handles things internally with SEO, page categories, FTP, etc. Plus, the templates are ugly, and the backend structure slows down the ongoing optimization. Do any of you have any great experiences you can share, regarding what has worked best for your clients? I know there are a million things I could search for in Google, but I wanted to hear it directly from the MOZ community. Or do you think its not worth combining all the sites into one? It would be a bigg project, but I feel it would get the client much better results. (we did not create/design any of the existing stores, only hired for optimizing)

[donford]

I'm a bit biased but I never had any issues with Oscommerce. There are a couple SEO packages out there that are very good, plus they give you the ability to manually set your category pages titles / descriptions.

I've used it for over 10 years and never had an issue that I couldn't find a solution too. Today the cart is very streamlined and backend friendly. However with tons of products the big challenge will be getting all them uploaded. There are ad-ons for that like Easy Populate and some third party software that can help.

From an SEO standpoint, I have never had trouble ranking an Oscommerce site that I have worked on.

My opinion hope it helps,

Don

[StelinSEO]

Hi David,

You're definitely on the right track with bringing all the sites together. Then you've got everything in the one place and will only have to focus on doing SEO, content and link building for the single site. Plus all your authority can be amalgamated together via 301 redirect (provided these are clean and don't have bad backlinks), which will help with rankings.

Aside from general keyword research targeting via meta data configuration, I'll recommend you implement a solid content strategy. If you're going to be putting out a lot of products and you're duplicating the content, I'd consider canonicalising it back to the original source and rewriting any products have big search volume. Secondly, I'd make sure you have at least 200 words of content on your category pages using LSI keywords to boost on-page relevance and get some quality links built to these pages. If you follow that strategy you should get some good results. I wrote a blog post about Google Hummingbird and optimising you content with LSI keywords, you can check it out here.

In terms of an actual ecommerce platform, I've worked with Magento a lot with big ecommerce sites. Seems to have a lot of functionality with plug-ins, a lot of big brand sites use it and it's built by eBay so they must be doing something right.

Here's a guide that highlights common issues with Magento: https://paulnrogers.com/magento-technical-seo-issues-to-look-out-for/

The most common issue I've seen is duplicate content that is caused by the /shopby/ directory. If you implement the below robots.txt file, you should see a lot of the unnecessary, dynamic URLs excluded.

I also recommend using siteliner.com to identify any internal duplicate content on the site.

##Magento SEO Improvements robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: */index.php/
Disallow: */catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: */catalog/category/view/
Disallow: */catalog/product/view/
Disallow: */catalogsearch/
Disallow: */catalogue/product_compare/
Disallow: */catalogue/category/view/
Disallow: */catalogue/product/view/
Disallow: */cataloguesearch/
Disallow: */checkout/
Disallow: */control/
Disallow: */contacts/
Disallow: */customer/
Disallow: */customize/
Disallow: */newsletter/
Disallow: */poll/
Disallow: */review/
Disallow: */sendfriend/
Disallow: */shopby/
Disallow: */tag/
Disallow: */wishlist/
Disallow: */catalog/product/gallery/
Disallow: CVS
Disallow: .svn
Disallow: .idea
Disallow: .sql
Disallow: .tgz
Disallow: /admin/

## Do not crawl common Magento technical folders
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /errors/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /shell/
Disallow: /var/

## Do not crawl common Magento files
Disallow: /api.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /get.php
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /README.txt
Disallow: /RELEASE_NOTES.txt

## Do not crawl sub category pages that are sorted or filtered.
Disallow: /*?dir*
Disallow: /*?dir=desc
Disallow: /*?dir=asc
Disallow: /*?limit=all
Disallow: /*?mode*

## Do not crawl 2-nd home page copy (example.com/index.php/). Uncomment it only if you activated Magento SEO URL
.
## Disallow: /index.php/

## Do not crawl links with session IDs
Disallow: /*?SID=

## Do not crawl checkout and user account pages
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /onestepcheckout/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customer/account/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/

## Do not crawl seach pages and not-SEO optimized catalog links
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /catalog/category/view/
Disallow: /catalog/product/view/

## SERVER SETTINGS

## Do not crawl common server technical folders and files
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /cleanup.php
Disallow: /apc.php
Disallow: /memcache.php
Disallow: /phpinfo.php

[JasmineA]

As far as the AdWords accounts go, you should choose the account that is performing the best and copy everything over through AdWords Editor. Before copying everything over, you will need to have one merchant center upload that has all of the products first then it's easier to move everything to the best performing account. I don't think there is any way for your Google Rep to be able to promise a transfer of history, so the account may take 4-6 months to return to a similar performance level.

I think that managing all of these products in one place from an advertising perspective is significantly easier than running them all through a bid management system. and it's likely right now that they may be trying to compete against each other and drive up costs.