Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I checked with my hosting support and they confirmed the alias is a 301.   So I don't need to do anything. redirect-wise.

After the new site is in place. is it worth it to re-work our old .htaccess file so it points to the new site?

Stephen

We are rebranding our store with a new name. We have purchased a NewDomainName.  Can I just make the "Old Domain Name" an alias for the "NewDomainName"?

The site will not change in any other way than having a new logo.  This is an e-commerce site with over 100 categories of artisan made products.  So once we move the site, the old domain will be empty.

Thank you

Stephen

Thank you--   That's looks like a great resource- still working on this and appreciate your input

Stephen

Dandelion-

I'll look at both those and let you know

Stephen

Hi Dandelion and Thank You for the response..

When you said "Then set up 404's for the popular but discontinued image" did you mean to say "set up 301's"?

And may I ask how do you discover exact images?  I am not using wordpress and don't know of any add-ons that help ..

Best wishes

Stephen 
(sorry for the delay in responding-- been having email issues..)

What do you lose by deleting a product and it's images from an e-commerce site? We have many product images with pinterest pins and shares or that show up on google images searches. Our site is an active American craft gallery with jewelry, art and handmade gifts from about 300 different artists. Most products are made in small quantities others are 1 of a kind. So we often have products selling out.  Most items are organized by artist.

Are there good practices to follow that will best keep our social media presence and links?  I'd also like to stop buying extra space for all those images on my server

Thanks so much

Stephen

Thank you- just what I needed

I am getting alot of hits from blexhn30.webmeup.com.   My web host says it could be a web service. Is this part of moz local activity?  Otherwise I want to block it. Have you seen this before??

Some of my art object products have words and phrases  engraved on them. The words  relate to the images on the product. In the product descriptions, I have been putting quotes around the entire list. Would I get better long tail results if I didn't use the quotation marks?   In other words, do the quotes make everything between them an exact match phrase?

For example:
Current product description: 
The worlds around the edge of the lazy susan read, "Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest."

Thank you for helping with this, all comments on how to present this kind of content are welcomed-

Stephen

kSOjt5a

Thank you Jane-

Can you tell me what the "Options +FollowSymLinks" is for?

And by the way, after everything is 301'd would you keep the old site hosted forever?

Best wishes

Stephen

Just what I was looking for.  & Thank you Aleyda for the tip on checking to see that the url with escaped characters is really on the site. That reduced the # of redirects needed by 75%.

Thank you very much for sharing those results.

The key word is a xyz design measuring spoon.  The only difference is how they are displayed or attached to each other.  Actually, your opinion about the keywords made me see I could improve my keyword phrase "xyz design measuring spoon ."  I'll go with that and the 1 page.

Thank you JDP

I have a wordpress blog hosted on a separate domain.  I have a new empty blog on a subdomain of my-commerce  main site. The new blog has a different wordpress theme & categories than the old blog.

What is a good way to populate the new blog with content from the old?

What do I do with the old blog once the move is done?

Thank you for your thoughts on this

Handcrafter

This is a site with handcrafted home décor products. Is it better seo to have 1 product for each spoon style and use attributes to show the display options?

The decorative display details are important. How do you deal with the important details of the display options?

One set of products is measuring spoon sets. For each spoon there are 4 different display options: wood or pewter and hang on a tall post or hang on a wide wall hanger. And there are 8 different spoon styles.

The pewter displays have design details matched to the spoon style. (eg. the fish spoon has fishes on it's hanger, the fleur de lys has fleur de lys on it)

So the attributes do not change the product itself but instead change the look of how they are displayed.

At present each display option/ spoon style is shown as a separate item. That makes 32 different products on the category page.

What do you feel is the best way to deal with showing style details and consolidating pages for better seo?

Best wishes from Vermont

Handcrafter

Hi Jorge,

On our craft gallery site our category pages are most important because the products under them change.

We use the category pages to hold common information.  For instance, we have a category for handcrafted lazy susans.  On that category page we detail care, alternate sizes available and how they are made.

On a different category page we may have a glossary of terms used on the products page. This avoids duplicate content on those product pages.  It also sets the stage for linking from the product pages back to the common information. This ought to signal the importance of the category to google.

Best wishes

Handcrafter

Thank you Doug-

This site sells work by 100s of artisans under a url  like smalltownartisans.com.  The "/brandname" is one of our better know artisans with  a wide range of products. So it is not repeated in the url

Do you think the "smalltownartisans.com". brand should be included in the page titles along with the artisan-brandname? And could you expand on the simple ways to ttest what works best?

Thanks again for all you your comments

Handcrafter

Hi Joseph- What will people be searching for? Does each keyword have it's own unique focus? It seems you may want to create unique pages covering each keyword or group of keywords that stand alone. Within that content you might list locations or services unique to each city. If the services are all the same, could you make 1 unique page describing those services? That way you could simply list the cities and use text links to the services page. Good luck- Handcrafter

As part consolidating our site navigation, I have an opportunity to change how we name url s on child pages.  At present,  I think there are 2 problems that could be fixed. 
1.As you drill down, the brand name is not part of  each url.
2. Also, the urls show abreviations that are not customer friendly.

Are these worth changing? I am redirecting pages whether I change the naming or not.

Below  is my current navigation and below that the changed navigation I am considering.

Many thanks to all that look and share their thoughts.

Handcrafter

--- details --

This is an e-commerce site with on hand products and similar products which are custom ordered from a catalog:

Current Navigation Drill Down:

/ctgy/brandname.html

/ctgy/brandname-onh.html
           /ctgy/onhmir.html

then the specific products:
                    /onhmir/30322-onhmir92_741.html
                   /onhmir/30324-onhmir96_743.html

The catalog has more products and so has 1 extra level of child category pages:
 ctgy/brandname.html
     /ctgy/brandname-cat.html
                /ctgy/brandname-catmir.html
                       /ctgy/design1catmir.html
                        /ctgy/design2catmir.html

then the specific products:
                           /catmir/30322-catmirhappy.html
                          /catmir/30324-catmirhappy.html

Changed Naming Under Consideration:
On pages above the  product page, (category pages) spell out all words and place the brand name in the parent url.  The result would be:

/ctgy/brandname.html

/ctgy/brandname-on-hand.html
            /ctgy/brandname-on-hand-mirror.html

then the specific products:
                    /brandname-on-hand-mirror/30322-onh-mir92_741.html
                    /brandname-on-hand-mirror/30324-on-hand-mir96_743.html

The catalog has more products and so has 1 extra level of child category pages:

/ctgy/brandname-catalog.html
            /ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror.html
                /ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror-style1.html
                ctgy/brandname-catalog-mirror-style2.html

then the specific products:
                   /brandname-catalog-mirror-style1/30322-cat-mirhappy.html
                    /brandname-catalog-mirror-style1/30324-cat-mirhappy.html

I am using a miva merchant shopping cart. On the corporate blog, they advise against using wordpress on the domain because credit cards demand very high security.

And thank you for the link to http://www.michielgaasterland.com (marketing in plain language - wooo!)