Switching ecommerce CMS's - Best Way to write URL 301's and sub pages?

[Hyrule]

Hey guys,

What a headache i've been going through the last few days trying to make sure my upcoming move is near-perfect.

Right now all my urls are written like this /page-name (all lowercase, exact, no forward slash at end).

In the new CMS they will be written like this: /Page-Name/ (with the forward slash at the end).

When I generate an XML sitemap in the new ecomm CMS internally it lists the category pages with a forward slash at the end, just like they show up through out the CMS. This seems sloppy to me, but I have no control over it. Is this OK for SEO? I'm worried my PR 4, well built ecommerce website is going to lose value to small (but potentially large) errors like this.

If this is indeed not good practice, is there a resource about not using the forward slash at the end of URLS in sitemaps i  can present to the community at the platform? They are usually real quick to make fixes if something is not up to standards.

Thanks in advance,

-First Time Ecommerce Platform Transition Guy

[G-Force]

Hi Paul,

I think the previous URL structure was better and you should fix the new cart to use the same URLs as the old one. You'll probably have to go dig into the cart's source code to do that, but it might also simply be a settings in your ecommerce's control panel.

I doubt having a trailing slash to a URL will have a significant impact on your rankings. What is important is that you stay consistant in the way you link to your pages. If you change your URLs, be sure you 301 redirect every single previous URL to their new one.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[TellThemEverything]

Are these URL's to categories/folders or product detail pages? Generally you'd expect the trailing slash on folders only, e.g.

/foldera/
/foldera/producta

The sitemap must match the exact URL's used on the site obviously - I would expect a slight penalty if your URL's in sitemap cause a redirect. That would be sloppy.

Having said all this, consistency is key - not necessarily whether there are slashes or not. You must be careful though that whichever someone uses (and they'll link to you both ways) you always redirect to the same style.

[Hyrule]

James,

Consistency has me worried quite a bit, simply because some things I don't have control over - for example if i 301 all my URLS to lowercase (which i very much want to do) - than they will still show up with upper-casing in the sidebar and on the XML sitemap. This goes for my product lists as well, they show up with upper-casing via the way the CMS renders them.

I believe I have two choices, and please correct me if I’m wrong. I could 1.) either get the engineers to make it so everything is lowercase, which may or may not be possible OR 2.) I could fully embrace the new CRM - upper-casing and all, and just do 1 set of 301's from old site to new site.

Let me know what you think and thanks a bunch for your help thus far.

[TellThemEverything]

Sounds like you should just pick the way the CMS renders them, upper case. And just redirect any lowercase/mixedcase to that?  As I said, it doesnt matter at all which you pick - but everything on your site must match.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Paul,

We're going through old unanswered questions and following up. How is that headache coming? Can you pass along any helpful lessons learned? If your question has been answered or you've had a helpful response, it'd be great if you could mark that as well. Thanks!

[tylerfraser]

The change is no problem, unless you have links to those pages. Then I would just make your CMS keep the url structure. (Create a sanbox and send the job to someone on elance)

If you change url structure: Create an index sitemap file. Then create a sitemap for the old site and the new site. If the urls are different in any way this is very good to do. Then submit the sitemap in webmaster tools and it should show two. Then google will crawl both pages faster and see the redirects and get your new URLs updated fast.