New Ecommerce Engine? Don’t forget your 301 Re-directs
by Ryan - September 8th, 2006 5:03 pm
We recently upgraded a few sites to the latest version of our ecommerce platform, e-shop v3. In doing so we were able to provide www.mywrestlingroom.com and www.essentialapparel.com with some nice added features and overall, a more effective ecommerce solution. Conversions will be better with the new software, no doubt.
(note* my wrestling room was on eshop v2 and essential apparel was on marketlive)
So, as long as the budget and the business is there to justify a change for the better, shouldn’t it be a no brainer to upgrade? Sort of… One of the costs of switching to v3 was that the URL structure would be different from e-shop v2 and the marketlive engine. For anyone interested in their search engine rankings, that’s not the greatest thing in the world to hear. All a search engine has to define a webpage is its URL. They don’t call it a web address for nothing. And each page in your site has its own address, the URL. A few years ago, this might have actually been reason enough NOT to upgrade. Can you believe that? A reason so powerful that it hampered the growth of your business (losing rankings!!)?
Well, good thing today the situation is not so dire because of the wide-scale acceptance by the search engines, of standard re-directs. By using a permanent 301 re-direct, all of the old URL’s will be forwarded to the new URLs. And not only will they be re-directed, but using the 301 is in essence informing the search engines the page has been permanently moved. And that’s exactly what we did for Wrestling Room and EA.
(Using a 302 re-direct will tell the search engines the page has temporarily moved.)
If you’re interested in learning more about re-directs and how they can help you if your URLs are changing, there are several excellent resources that can be found by running a quick Google search or visiting the below list of URLs directly:
- Mcanerin Networks 301 (IIS) redirect for SEO
- Mcanerin Networks 301 (Apache) redirect for SEO
- High Rankings 301 re-direct thread
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