Version 6 - 7 & Search Engines

[Owen Drumm]

I have just upgraded Developer from 6 to 7. I have kept both version on my PC as I am going to use verision 7 to completely revamp the website.

My question is what effect this would have of our position on search engines as we are quite high up on most engines for our relevant keywords.

As the actual content of the site will be more or less similar and the page names will be the same. The only difference will be in our use of components and attributes mostly. Does anyone feel that this will have an adverse effect?

[Mike Hughes]

I doubt if it will have much effect.

The thing to watch out for is that you might end up reducing the amount of on page content that you have. i.e. a separate product will tend to have an associated description, whereas replacing it as an option on another product will tend to have far less description.

In the end though I'd say it always best to make the customer purchase decision as easy as possible and the proper use of options can help in that respect. You can always add extra content to the page if you think it needs it.

Mike

[Legends]

Hi

When you change your site, take care not to change the page URl's. if you do change the page URl (actinic call it page name), the search engines will no longer see that page and you will lose your positions.

You will then have to wait for the search engines to index and position your "new" pages. That can take a considerable time especially with google.

Version 7 does have the facility to input page titles, and choosing the correct title can be critical in improving your search engine ranking.

Hope this helps

Cheers

[steveaich]

We upgraded from 4 to 7, had to spend the time making sure the url's stayed the same, but apart from that saw no adverse effect on search engine rankings.

[jont]

I saw a marginal increase in search engine rankings - mainly down to using the new v7 features in a more focussed way - including page titles and fragments