Hi OWG, thank you for your piece of advice! it is worth it every penny!
I have one question though:
Currently I host my site at godaddy.com with a custom shopping cart, now I am switching to a new shopping cart called netsuite. So these are two completely different hostings. The difference between the existing and the new pages' urls is that with the existing shopping cart (godaddy) the url extension is .htm, but with the new shopping cart (netsuite) there's no extension for the urls (automatically generated). So urls will be different, and the product pages that currently are indexed with my .htm urls will be unaccesible.
I need to do a 301 redirect on the old hosting even if the domain will now be pointing to the new hosting?
I had the impression when I read your post that your solution was based on switching shopping carts but not switching hostings. Is that correct?
Any help here will be very much appreciated!! Thank you!
Quote:
Originally Posted by OldWelshGuy
Matt, I agree with bagi with 100% conviction. BUT with the following caveat, you do NOT have to do it for all pages!
This is what I suggest you do.
1. Check your backlinks PROPERLY, using yahoo, altavista, MSn & Google webmaster tools.
2. Identify your deep links (links pointing to inner pages)
3. Identify which pages are ranking for terms that bring in traffic (using your server logs)
4. Identify pages that are getting traffic landing on them regularly (this could be from emails, virals, pages on forums that are members only, popular bookmarked pages etc.
5. Identify corresponding new pages for the above pages
6. Set up 301 redirects in the htaccess for the affected pages.
What you will have then achieved is to ensure that you do not send existing traffic to a lost page, therefor maximising it. You will also have told google which of your pages have moved, and which are no longer in existence. the new sitemap will mop up everything else!
There is a simpler option however, in as much as you could set up a 301 redirect match between the two structures so that any request for one url string will be forwarded to the new url string.
One last question,
Where shall I send the invoice for this high quality advice LOL
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