Seo

[pob27]

Hi,

A client has an old standing large-ish Catalog site with excellent page ranking.

For reasons outside their control they have to move to a non-Actinic database-driven e-commerce solution.

What steps should they take to help preserve their search engine rankings?

Is it possible to do a site-wide '301 re-direct' on every existing Catalog page?

Thanks,

Bass

[SpecTech]

moving pages round is very risking as reirecting a page could caus the entire site to drop in the rakings especially if the entire sites pages are redirected. but I am afraid if you were to do this you would have to do it manually I think. I would suggest just keeping the page titles exact and maybe change the new ecommerces directly to acatalog.

[leehack]

Page names the same and then either folder name the same or use a better named one and htaccess to permanently move from within acatalog to the new one.

[pob27]

Hi,

I know its a bad situation...

All products will have new page names.

All Catalog pages will cease to be used, although we can leave them on the web.

I just hoped there was an easy way to add 301 Redirects to each page of HTML.

cheers,

B

[pob27]

Hi,

What's htaccess?

Thanks,

B

[Rich Brady]

.htaccess file can be used for a number of things, one of which is the setting up of 301 re-directs.

Ideally you would have a 301 for every one of your actinic pages, but you could set up a global redirect so that everything with "/acatalog/" is re-directed to a new page.

Not as good as the seprate 301s, but better than none at all. How many actinic pages are we talking?

[Duncan Rounding]

Hi,

What's htaccess?

Thanks,

B

You serious? I thought you were a developer that also offered hosting.
Try Google.

[grantglendinnin]

Try Teclan - they know what they're talking about and as far as I'm aware, do a good job at generating .htaccess redirects from one cart to another.

[pob27]

Mmmm! 15,500 lines!

B

[Duncan Rounding]

If the new cart does not allow fully named pages then you will be taking a step backwards with SEO. htaccess will allow wildcard replacements to redirect should the site structure change but is not suited thousands of lines of individual pages.

Otherwise look into html redirects of the form,:
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.the-domain-you-want-to-redirect-to.com">
This could be interpreted by Google as a 302 (temporary) redirect however.

[pinbrook]

you can not preserve ranking when changing from one cart to another, the best you can do is try to imitate the pages with page names, titles and body text.

a 2 second solution is to wipe the entire acatalog folder when the new site goes up and do a 404 page not found. A better way is to take every page and use htaccess as previously discussed and permanantly redirect from the old page to the new page for the same product.

[grantglendinnin]

There's a chance you could produce an .htaccess file fully-automated with a bit of hacking around.

In the Actinic database, in the Product table, you have the URL's stored for a products 'extra info' page. The Brochure Pages table holds similar data, as does the Catalog Section table. Now it really all depends on which software the new site uses...

[Duncan Rounding]

Do you think an htaccess file would handle 15500 lines?

[leehack]

Probably, but the server and the website would fall apart trying to work .

[pinbrook]

15500 lines

is that product lines or 15500 actual pages that need to be redirected