Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It's as simple as the title. We're a well established ecommerce company about to move away from the actinic platform on to a new magento site. Of late our long held rankings have slipped and we are looking for guidance in making up the lost ground and getting the most SEO wise from magento.

Thanks is advance.

As a retailer i have used actinic, interspire, oscommerce and am soon to release a magento store.

Interspire i believe is now retired and their support for the product was rubbish which was such a pity as it was so easy to use. Actinic are well behind the curvea nd the software was very buggy. oscommerce was a pain  but magento i have found to be really versatile and really not so complicated as people say to use.

You can have a designer re-skin it from scratch, buy a template or buy a template close to what your looking for and then just get it modified - this can save a bit of money.  There are loads of extensions that are quite simple to install using Magento connect .

The only downside is it is resource hungry, you'll need a dedicated server to really give it the juice it needs and for us the order processing was hideously longwinded - but there are extensions that can help abbreviate it.

One of the hardest things for us was finding a cart that ticked all the usual boxes but also one thats workflow somewhat resembled ours - you don't want to reinvent all your warehouse pick-pack procedures just 'cos your software says so!

Anyway that’s my personal take. HTH.

Yes i did mean 'Magento's Own URL Re-Writes"Our developers have produced re-writes from all our old url to the new ones through the url rewrite management and as we're yet to go live i wanted to check this was the best method.

We are using community to start with as i believe it is not too difficult to upgrade - and there wasn't anything the other packages could offer us that we needed or couldn't get from an extension. However i'm eagerly awaiting the release of xcommerce to see what that brings and whether there's a migration path.

I've been very happy so far with its magentos versatility. We have opted for quite a few tweaks especially when it comes to its order processing which is longwinded to say the least.

We are also loosing the .html after advice from the guys here and opting for only the /lastcategory/productname and the /thelastcategory  for the url structure.

We are changing ecommerce platforms.

Is it best to use magentos own url re-writes to redirect every page of a site from its old url to it new one?

If you sell a range of products say 3 at the most, all on their own pages, is it ok to link to the other products within the range from each page? I have tried this and it eventually leads back to the same page is this a good, bad or doesn't really matter thing? Also is the anchor text still important?

We exist in a niche market with a good % of products that sell well at specific times of the year.

Lets say for example a red cup can be sold as a christmas red cup and a valentine red cup or just a red cup.

Would we be best to optimize each specific product specifically for those seasons/events on different pages or keep google pointed to just one page using a canonical link.

Thank you for your advice.

The url structure is not that straightforward to be able to write a rule - which is unfortunate.

How many redirects would you think to be acceptable as we have a vast product range?

We are an ecommerce site established in 2005 and currently have some great rankings.

We are about to move away from our existing platform, actinic and move on to Magento. This will change all our url's.

What are the steps we should be asking our web developers to follow in order to minimize the consequences of moving?

Thank you.