hi guys, i am becoming a partner in an online bookstore. it is an old and established business with a pr5 site, has about 1500 uniques per day, 90% coming from search engines. keywords are book names. however this being a very old site it does not have any friendly cms, just lots of manually added pages. i want to convert the whole site to an open source ecommerce solution like oscommerce. i am wondering if any of the seo experts can tell me what is the best way to do this to preserve rating and traffic for beginning. is it best to leave all old content besides new, or to 301 redirect all old pages to oscommerce pages, or something else? i hope someone had similar experience. thank you. best regards, vladimir
if you must give the site a face lift, then you have to. and as you said, you can do it in 2 ways. one by keeping the existing content as much as possible as your current ranking depends on your current content and keyword density. yes, backlinks too but they will stay there even if your site gets a new face. or you can do a complete diff site with redirect. if you implement ecommerce, make sure your site is search engine friendly and your pages can be viewed and crawled by bots. and at the same time, i will suggest you do some link building also as with new face and changes in your site, you don;t wanna fall behind in ranking. so some link building effort at the same time you make the changes will work as an added insurance for you. good luck
Create a site map of the existing site and then one of the new site before it goes live. Create a listing of the mappings from the old pages to the new pages and generate a bunch of 301 redirects that you can into htaccess.
So 301 redirects are the way to go? What will happen if two sites continue to coexist for some time. I was thinking in theory that maybe the site page rank will go up (more content), and instead of redirecting, on old pages we put a link to a new page. That way we boost new site and we wait for new pages to take over ranking position over time (since they will be much better optimized). Something like that. But it is too big of a business to experiment.