SEO Tips For Internet Marketers

Upgrading an ecommerce website to a completely new system can have a big impact on SEO whilst the search engines ‘catch up’ with the new information.

Simply turning the old site off and switching the new site on will generally destroy a majority of organic traffic for a period of between 3 – 5 weeks in our experience.  For some established ecommerce stores, 3 – 5 weeks is a nightmare to disappear in Google’s search results as many hundreds of sales are lost (usually just after a large investment has been made on new development work also).

The new site under development should be hidden away from search engine bots and spiders before it’s released.  If indexed early the new site under development will appear in search engine listings and you could run into serious duplicate content issues later on which can really hurt your SEO.  We use the ‘double dutch’ method of ensuring that search engines such as Google don’t bother crawling development websites:

Double Dutch Development Website Protection

Robots.txt - Ensure that a robots.txt is present on the root directory disallowing all search engines – read more about robots.txt files here

Meta index blocking - Meta tags can be added to the section of every page saying that it shouldn’t be counted in any search engine index. The code for this is:

301 Redirects are the main method to tell search engines that each page has moved to a new location.  These can be done in the .htaccess file which controls the server-side URL re-writes.  301's inform both the browser and the search engines that the page they are looking for has permanently moved to another location.

A checklist of all the pages that need to redirected to it’s relevant page on the new site is:

- Category pages
- Sub-category pages
- Product pages
- Landing pages
- Generic pages (including homepage is URL is different)

There are a few major issues that can arise when setting up all of the 301 redirects, here’s some tips to keep in mind:

301 Redirect Issues

Different category structures – Category pages are the most powerful pages on an ecommerce site for SEO so it’s important to get these redirects set-up correctly.  A new ecommerce site may have more categories or sub-categories than the old site it’s replacing or even vice-versa.  When redirecting go for the best matching category on the new site, it doesn’t matter if 2 or more old categories filter into one new one.  If the category no longer exists then redirect the old page to the new homepage, any redirect is better than none, 404 error pages are harmful in many ways.

Too many products to redirect – Redirecting each product URL to it’s location on a new ecommerce site can be long and tiresome task if done by hand when there are many products.  It can be almost an impossible task with over a thousand products; you need to either automate the process or redirect whole sections of products with the .htaccess file.  Automating product redirects can be achieved by using either product XML sitemaps, crawling software such as Xenu/Integrity or self made XML parsers, all of which require a good knowledge of excel spreadsheets unfortunately (some great excel tips can be found here).  If this all seems too difficult or time wasting then the .htaccess file can be used to capture any URL’s with a generic structure such as “http://domain.com/oldcategory/[any product URL]” and generally redirect towards the main category on the new site such as “http://domain.com/newcategory/“.

No clear existing URL structure – Sometimes an old ecommerce site used a non SEO-friendly URL structure containing any mixture of parameters, id numbers, non-canonical category orders and tracking codes.  This creates a confusing mish-mash of URL’s which may produce millions of URL’s with masses of duplicate content.  The only way to overcome this SEO nightmare is to redirect all the top ranking pages you have time to find and then redirect the entire rest of the site to the new homepage.  Start by redirecting all the links found on the homepage, the homepage usually passes over the most SEO power to it’s linked inner pages, plus the main navigation bar links should be included on the homepage.  Next you should redirect the top 100/200 pages from the main search engines (we just use Google) by performing the search [site:yourdomain.com], you can get Google to display 100 results per page instead of the average 10 if needed.  If you have time then you can use crawling software such as Xenu (PC) or Integrity (Mac) to find more pages high up the site’s architecture i.e pages you can reach within a fewer clicks from the homepage as possible.  All other pages can be caught by the .htaccess file to redirect to the new homepage, remember that a redirect is better than a 404 page.

Google now informs us that nearly all pagerank power is passed on through 301 redirects, which is great news if you’ve been optimising a web-page which will disappear when the website is upgraded.  People sometimes naturally link to inner pages and product pages on an ecommerce store, the more effort you put into making sure every page is catered for, the better.

If done properly Google will pick up the new website structure in less than a day and frantically index many pages over the next few weeks, our last site transition experienced an average 25% drop in organic traffic for 26 days before returning to normal (shown below):

Planning to upgrade an entire site in November could be a big mistake if you rely on the valuable Christmas period, if you want to make a major change then try and do it when your target customers are least active.

Google Webmaster Tools shows any detected 404 pages, keep a close eye on it after upgrading a site, you can export a list of 404 pages into a spreadsheet if needed to quickly add to the .htaccess file.

Remember to leave the redirects in place for several months until all the search engines have no trace of the old site in their indexes and good luck!

Labels: ecommerce, impact, little, upgrade, website