Any input / pointers for my upcoming Ecommerce move?

[Hyrule]

I posted this as a reply on my other question, but never got another responce...

I am basically moving ecommerce platforms to answer your question. I am keep the same domain (www.stbands.com). If you want to get even more specific i am moving from storesonline to corecommerce. Here's some more info:

• All meta tags, URLS, content is virtually going to be the same except my product pages and normal pages will end with .html, however my category pages will still be /categoryname (like a directory).
• My category URLS seem to build in a mod re-write fashion, which I hear is better for SEO (like /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/).
• I have set all my pages to use the rel=cananical tag, so if you are on the category  /sweatbands/head-sweatbands/  it cananicals back to /head-sweatbands
• The images are changing names as I upload them on a product because it auto creates new sizes. This differs from our old host and may affect our vertical image rankings. Should I 301 the image URLS?
• I am keeping the www. in my domain name, as opposed to just domain.com to keep everything the same.
• CoreCommerce automatically seems to make my products uppercase in the URL as they are in the title, but the url works both lowercase and uppercase so its not case sensitive.

This is just an overview of some things I think I have most of my bases covered, but i'm aiming for a april 1st launch / move for the new site.  Do you guys have any other pointers / suggestions?

[wissamdandan]

I have input and pointers

• Data Feeds for your products( Google/ Bing)
• Advise product URLs and basically all urs are lower case ( long term)
• dnt 301 image urls, but make sure they have Alt tags
• I would advise social Integrations (facebook  Likes)

[Hyrule]

Wissam,

Thank you I need to work on my Bing Feed... Anyone else have any pointers?

[TellThemEverything]

if any URL's work for upper and lower case, make sure you 301 one to the other. I recommend using lowercase, so redirect all upper or mixed case to all lower case.

oh, and dont forget sitemaps..

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[Hyrule]

James,

My URLS work for both lower case and uppercase. So the CMS spits out a product URL like this:

www.domain.com/Product-Describer-Keyword.html

but if the customer were to goto /product-describer-keyword.html or /Product-describer-keyword it also works automatically (without me manually doing a 301)

So can i assume this is build in?

[TellThemEverything]

if you can access the same page using multiple URL's this is BAD - you MUST 301 redirect all requests to a single URL - pick lowercase or whatever, but do not leave it as-is. It only takes one mistake on internal linking or a bad inbound link and you'll get all these indexed..

[wissamdandan]

please explain,

user can access http://www.domain.com/Product-Describer-Keyword.html and http://www.domain.com/product-describer-keyword.html ? if yes then you have a duplicate content issue, just to let you know that Google is smart to picking up the Url that is used by the CMS, but when you start getting links to the one not used by CMS then you have an issue .

[Hyrule]

It is the same product, there isn't multiple products. So the user can access the same product by going to any of the following::

/Levi-Blue-Jeans, /levi-blue-jeans, /LeVi-bLuE-JeAnS, or whatever,

But the main version is /Levi-Blue-Jeans. Just to re-inforce, this ins't going to a different page - its the same product. So basically my URLs are not case sensitive, but are produced as the product title, which uses some uppercase letters.

James,

I have the rel=cananical tag on all my product pages linking to the lowercase, exact version of the url.

[TellThemEverything]

I completely understand. But this is not good practice. rel=canonical is a band-aid, but I would definately try to 301 to that lowercase url if you can. Seriously.

[Hyrule]

James,

Thank you for your recommendation. Appreciate it.