Magento

so i came across magento last night and so far things are looking great. quite possibly we may be switching our osCommerce website over to Magento if the transition is easy. the question i have relating to SEO is; if i’m swtching from osCommerce to Magento, will I be committing SERP suicide? my website is PR3 with some inner pages PR2/PR1/PR0. it’s ranked pretty well in Google for certain keywords, and we get a lot of traffic. if i switch over from osCommerce, all the links will not exist anymore.

has anyone thought about this? thoughts/opinions.

With any platform change you will be taking a risk (this is not a Magento issue). You can certainly map and 301 redirect your old URLs to the new ones.

I am sure other members in the community will chime in on this topic.

huh?? pr3 is extremely low.

Yeah, PR3 is low and requires very little to achieve.  It might drop a bit initially after the switch, but I’m sure it’ll pick right back up within a few months.  What you do need to be worried about is people getting 404 errors when following the links from Google.  Like Roy said your best bet is to gather a list of URL’s that are indexed in Google and do 301 redirects to the new URL’s in Magento.  This will insure that people get to the right page from Google, and that Google will pick up the new URL’s and eventually drop the old ones.

sorry i’m new to the whole SEO/SERPS so PR3 was an achievement (although more then likely PR is just a number) and content/quality links count for more.

so should i 404 redirect all the missing pages to the new magento site (if i switch over)? or should i just leave everything alone, and let the search engines do their thing?

I would redirect dude. But PR3 will come to your new site in months.

alternative you can actually email all ppl on yur old site newsletter advising them of the change

or use both the redirect and the email approach

my 5 cents

R

But redirect your old pages with 301 not 404 to the fitting new pages of your magentoshop.
I think the PR schould not be a big problem, because the PR probably will not really important anymore for future and particial at this stage. Your (qualitiy) links from fitting good external contentsites are more weightily for future and not their PR and these links are the same after changing to magento.

Alex

You will want to use friendly redirects (301 redirects) for all urls on your site.  Try to map them to the new Magento site urls that match a similar product or topic.  Also make sure you create a site map and register these site maps with the big three.  http://www.sitemaps.org/ This will help the search engines find all the new urls you have created with Magento.  Try to take advantage of the SEO features that Magento has built in.  Then spend the time on your title tags as well as you descriptions.  Links are only as good as the landing page.

I don’t think you will have any problems converting your site over from OSC.

Good luck,
e.

Jaysn,

PR doesn’t really mean anything.  Traffic and sales are everything.  There are sites with very low PR ranking for very competitive keywords.  PR is only good for sites that are selling links (for example directories).  If you change over to Magento your home page will more than likely continue to have the same PR since most external links that are pointing to your home page will continue to point to your home page.  Your internal pages will lose all of it’s PR, but again PR doesn’t really mean anything. 

If a majority of your traffic goes to your inner pages, I would be very careful about your move.  But if the majority of your traffic lands on your home page, I wouldn’t be as concerned.

I would suggest reading up on SEO at forums.digitalpoint.com.

Thought I would chime in. Yes PR is just a number, but it still plays a big roll in SEO. Have you ever tried exchanging links with other websites without having any PR - it’s not easy to find people willing to do such an exchange.

Also, PR3 is not such a low ranking. Especially if the site is less than a year old.