I am involved with a project that involves moving from Yahoo Stores to MS Commerce Server. Currently the Yahoo Store is getting great SEO results (top 3 for most products and categories). My concern is that we will lose some of the great rankings even if we make a good move by doing correct 301 redirects and resetting feeds properly. I am looking for insights as to how well MS Commerce does with rankings and if there are any tips or advice in using it. Are there certain features we should use or not use? Are there add ons we should use? Thanks.
What you will be doing is not a good idea if this is a company. You will lose all SERP positions, ranking, page rank, etc. It will be much safer for you not to shut down the Yahoo Stores version until the MS Commerce Server version is "live" and indexed with page rank. From our experience, this could be 6 months. The primary "heads up" advise: All urls will change including internal linking. All extensions will change making all "file names" new to the SEs. MSCS is not Search Engine friendly. Does it support unique <title>, descriptions, keywords, H1-h6, etc. Can you duplicate the Yahoo "template" where the MSCS "template" will render the exact same html file. And this can go on and on. What you will do is start the SEO process over from scratch. Plan on this or your company will be down for a long time. Moving data between databases is easy. But you have to match the exact category, sub-category and detail templates the same or the SEs will look at them differently from the SEO standpoint. And you must keep the exact category, sub-category and detail file names and the associated url strings. If you are not an seo expert and can review and implement the same SEO on the new site, you will lose you SERP positions. We do this for a living, and we always run two seperate sites in parallel to do this. We "walk on water" on doing this, but Google, mistakes, etc. can bring a site down. And I mean for a long time. There is a learning curve and things you just can't control (i.e. Google indexing or changes). A company President that want sales to stay the same in this down turn. And finally, you are making this move for a reason. Part of this is to fix the design. So do it but don't put yourself in a box or time limit. Good luck and plan this out. Jim Catanich Catanich Internet Marketing Dallas, TX 75098
Thanks Jim. This is a company that has outgrown Yahoo stores and needed upgrade both on the web and on internal systems. I am coming in at a time when they are preparing to launch one of several sites on the new platform, problems are expected but this will be a small part of the business with other parts rolling out later. One thing I was planning on doing was using 302 redirects for every product, category and sub-category. I have done this with other sites but I was handling dozens of pages with little financial impact, in this case there are thousands of pages with significant impact. I am a bit shocked if Commerce Server does not support unique titles, descriptions, keywords, H1-h6, etc. Can this be overcome with a little bit of .Net programming? How do you manage to run separate stores? Are they effectively variations of the domain (www.oursite.com and store.oursite.com)? Do you have an example of a well SEO'd MS Commerce Server site? I want to see what is best case scenario regarding on page SEO with that platform. Thanks again.