SEO Migration / Transition from Current Platform. Have Experience?

[PaulDylan]

We're currently about to make the switch from one commerce platform to another (volusion to magento,) and wondering if anyone here, at all, has any experience with having a site for a few years and then switching platforms.

How did the engines react? What did you do? Time frame for things that happened, etc...would love some feedback and input on your story if you've migrated platforms.

Thanks

[bradwayland]

I've gone through this many times.  Here are some high level points to consider.

1.  Keep as much of the content the same as possible

2.  Keep as many urls the same as possible

3.  Be sure you have managed your potential 404 errors prior to launch

Many times people just accept that some new commerce platform uses a different url structure for products (as an example).  I personally don't accept that answer from the dev team on the surface.  If I have 5000 product pages then I'm not really interested in changing that URL structure unless it is ABSOLUTELY necessary.  Sure, 301's work great but if you are trying to minimize potential downsides it would be better to not have to place 5000 301s.

I'd recommend considering content that isn't moving over.  Have you done your homework on how much of it is getting traffic?  Or, is everything moving over?  When I switch platforms the goal for my teams is to make the switch in a way that the average user would never know.  Google certainly will know when you have gone from volusion to magento but making it less noticeable to users is important.  It is difficult enough to switch platforms so you don't really want to bring new potential CRO issues into the conversation.

I saw a person on here yesterday that had 10,000 404 errors after the switch.  To me this is just poor planning.  You should not have to wait for webmaster tools to tell you there is a 404 problem.  Google has a history of penalizing sites that are inaccessible or have a large number of 404 errors for even a brief period of time.  I had a blog that I purchased and switched the PHP handler on.  After 3 weeks I realized that every post was getting 404 errors.  I fixed the issue but never got back 1/2 the traffic I lost.

All in all, Google does a fantastic job of handling your changes.  If your titles, content, and urls are the same for your main traffic pages then you should expect it to be a fairly seamless transition.  Hope this helps.

[MoosaHemani]

Paul, this is something I have experienced a lot... there are many blogs who claims that good planning on platform migration can help you stay away from the loss of search engine traffic as well as  rankings but I think migration is going to give a temporary effect on rankings and traffic and bad planning can make it preeminent.

Here are the following things you should keep in mind before you are starting to migrate a platform from one ecommerce platform to another.

-          Make sure that the next ecommerce should have all the necessary SEO plug-ins installed that you will need to make your website look good to search engines as well as users.

-          Make sure to do a proper 301 redirection on pages and on category and product level. Any mistakes will results as a ranking loss from the search engines.

-          Try to keep the URLs same as possible so that redirect should not be needed

Try to update xml site map and webmaster tool about the change so that Google can track and re crawl the pages accordingly.

Let me assure you again that this might produce a negative impact on rankings and traffic for a short period of time but as soon as the pages started to crawl it will get fixed accordingly.

Hope this helps!

[DennisSeymour]

Like Brad said, just try to retain the URL structures as much as possible unless you are really aiming to make it more seo friendly.

Do the migration quickly and make sure to minimise broken pages.

It'll usually affect your rankings, but you'll recover. Just do cleanup quickly and have your linking plan ready