E-Commerce Cart Migration SEO Advice

[StuSol]

Hi all,

First time post here.

We operate a small ecommerce store and plan on moving cart, most likely from Interspire to Magento or possibly Prestashop.

We want to be sure not to damage our current search rankings when making this move and ideally improve our rankings at the same time by utilizing the new cart’s <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">seo</acronym> functionality as best we can.

Stage 1 of the project will see us simply move our current store from one cart to another. For this move we are keeping our existing single domain and intend on moving our current set up without making many, if any changes to content, product descriptions , URL’s etc as we believe this best practice for ensuring our current rankings remain as they are- is such thinking correct? Or should we do otherwise

Stage 2 would see us operate a multi lingual, multistore, with 4 domains operating with 1 back end. For the 3 new domains we are looking to set up these storefronts in whichever manner will be most beneficial from an <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">seo</acronym> perspective

We welcome any advice as to what we should consider? What we should and shouldn’t do? and best practices for this project

Please advise if any other information is required to best answer our query

Thanks for taking the time to read our post, any forthcoming tips and advice will be greatly appreciated

[MonicaOConnor]

You are correct in keeping information the same. You have to redirect the URLs if they change. If you don't do that you will be starting at 0 with ranking power. I am not sure that you will be able to move with out changing URLs completely. The set up could be different, there could be a different protocol (PHP, HTM, etc). Make sure any 301 redirects are done properly.

I am not sure how to handle the second part of your question as I have 0 experience in that area.

[StuSol]

Hey Monica

Thanks for your answer, can elaborate further on why we would not be able to keep the same URL's as the we have just now? Any information provided is greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

[MonicaOConnor]

If you can keep the majority of the URLs the same, that is beneficial. What you want to make sure of, is that on any page that the URL does change (You will probably have a few) make sure you redirect them.

For example if your URL is abc.com/blue-widgets.php and it changes to abc.com/blue-widgets.htm, you will have to redirect the .php to the .htm. If that part of the URL structure doesn't change, and you change nothing else, then you should be ok.

[Nayotanguyen]

In your case, Interspire to Magento migration solution can solve your problem with migrate Products and Categories SEO URLs and migrate 301 SEO URLs of categories and products from old store to Magento shopping cart. It supports multi-language and multi-store. Check it: http://litextension.com/shopping-cart-migration/interspire-to-magento.html