Hi, Has anyone got any experience/advice or tips, on preserving the SEO of a website running an old version of magento, when rebuilding with a new hosting company. Currently we have v1.3 if magento (ancient i know) and looking to install the latest. My plan was to make a list of the existing indexed web pages in google and then recreate these in the new version of magento. .htaccess would then be amended to show 301 redirects. I imagine we would need to retain the Meta Title, Description, URL as well as on page text. Is this the correct setup, or is there a better way? Also if the page content is poor (my opinion), how can you improve without making a mess of things? I get the impression that any pages already indexed and which get traffic (even if very few) should be recreated? Thanks in advance. Fuzz
Hmm. you may wind up with a few issues but off the top of my head I don't think the urls would be different. Don't quote me on that but it should likely not be much of an issue unless you restructure the nav. tree for instance. If you do find you have a bunch of 301's you can do some rewrites but you should be fine. I recently moved someone from blogger or blogspot over to wordress. It created some issues but I didn't like the posts in the first place. It took about a month to fully flesh out but things are fine now. hope that helps, Nigel
Hi Nigel, Many thanks for the response. At the moment the current (old) site has urls ending .html For ease of remembrance visitors, i'm considering removing this extension in the new version of magento. So i think this will require the bulk of the 301s. By Nav.Tree do you mean the categories etc? I plan to change some of these.
Yes, changing the category structure would cause that issue. As for the .html you can simply rewrite .html to / basically which should resolve a bunch of them at once rather than on a url by url basis. Additionally, you will probably want to check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/magmi/ I have migrated 10,000+ plus products from weird shopping carts into Magento in a matter of minutes. Even with the default theme you may have a few issues trying to update all the way up to 1.8. Nigel
what is meant by preserving SEO, if you are saying you want to retain ranks while you are creating new pages than apply proper redirects from old to new pages.
When it comes to improving the copy on your website, your task is relatively easy. I'd just make sure to get someone who knows both a) writing and b) marketing and SEO. What you want is to hit the balance between being clear and informative...and having the right keyword density with the proper keywords (the ones for which your site is optimized). The copy on your page is static, so the help that you get from fixing it up will pretty much end there. If you can work some type of constant content scheme into your website (something like attaching your blog), you can utilize copy to a much more effective degree, as your site will be continuously populated with fresh, relevant, high-quality content. _ Sean B.