Best Practice for Moving to Prestashop

[ajensen27]

Hello,

 

So I have been developing and designing my prestashop store for the past 6 months. I am ready within the next few days to move my site into production however I am scared that I will lose a lot of my SERP's that we have built over the past 10 years with our current site. We are within the top 3 results for many of our major keywords. I have kept product descriptions, page titles, keywords, etc mostly the same for each corresponding page so hopefully that helps.

 

What do you feel are the best practices for moving a site to Prestashop? I have set up the .htaccess file to redirect all my old pages to the next corresponding pages.

 

Should I maybe leave up the old site and just put links to the new site on their? Something like "Try our new BETA site".?

 

Any and all help is appreciated!

 

Thanks!

Alex

[FME_Modules]

The best practice is to use 301 permanant redirection as it passes more than 90% link juice to the new page.

[lionna]

I would be also very interested in this topic. Everyone writes about permanent redirection links in .htaccess, but how is it done? Can you define the new URL to redirect the old URL for every single indexed page? or do you redirect all old URLs to the homepage of new site?

[vekia]

Can you define the new URL to redirect the old URL for every single indexed page? or do you redirect all old URLs to the homepage of new site?

 

second solution is bad for seo (old url > homepage of new)

it's better to use first one (old url > new url)

 

and of course it is possible

[ajensen27]

Lionna, I actually did a lot of research on this since no one was answering here and here are the main things I found you want to be prepared for before moving your site.

 

1. Redirect all your old URL's to the new URL (not the homepage as you'll lose all your "link juice").

2. Create a Google sitemap (or update it if you already have one).

3. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap there. A lot of helpful information on these tools.

4. After moving the site, use a tool like Xenu to check for broken links on your site.

5. Use Google Analytics to track any boken links you might have missed.

 

These are the things that I did and I seem to have not lost much SERP traffic to my site.

 

Good luck!

[lionna]

Hi vekia, I thought so too..

 

Hi ajensen27,

Wow, that's a nice sum-up, thanks ajensen27. The only thing: I am desperate to find any PrestaShop module to redirect every single old URL to a new URL.. I have more than 3'000 indexed pages.

 

For example, in my Virtuemart Shop I have a wonderful module SH404SEF, where I can set up redirect/aliases to every single page. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything similar for Presta.

[ajensen27]

No problem! Yeah fortunately our old site only had about 50 or so pages so I just did it all manually. Someone else might be able to help you with finding a module to do it.

[billkou]

Hello!

 

You don't do it with the module. So many entries on a module will make the site go slow, that's for sure. And if they're stored on the database then it's going to be a nightmare.

 

You do it on apache/nginx webserver and preferably by someone that's experienced.

 

From my experience so far ( I am with Virtuemart but will soon move to Prestashop or Mijoshop - haven't decided yet ) when you make webserver redirects, you only need to have the categories redirecting to the new ones, because most probably these are visible on the google search results , and not the individual products.

 

But even if you lose your rankings for a while you will definitely regain them ( I regained mine after restructuring my URLs and came up with 400K - yes 400 thousand - 404 error URLs ) and maybe you will do even better. But it will take 1-2 weeks and maybe for some days your results won't appear at all.

 

If your previous results were landing on quality landing pages on Google, you won't lose the ranking when it's time to be back where you were.

 

So, find someone experienced on redirects and have him point the old category URLs to the new ones and you will be fine.

[ajensen27]

We have plenty of our products listed on Google in 1st page SERP's. Also have many on different link exchanges that you wouldn't want people to now get to a "page not found".

 

You need to redirect EVERYTHING.

[billkou]

Well if that's the case then yes, you need to redirect those as well.

 

But keep in mind though, that it's not only the URL that is important.

 

If the new page from your new website doesn't have as much "good" information for Google ( meta keywords-description, content structure, H1 tags and other code related issues etc etc ) then the ranking could be a bit worse for some time.

 

Links are important as well, for those who have them. I managed to be on the first page for most of the important keywords that affect my website without getting any good backlink from anyone, instead my website is spammed by low quality websites with links and this hasn't affected my rankings at all.

[lionna]

Hi guys

thanks for your input! That was exactly my concern: how do I redirect every single page from PrestaShop to old VM? Billkou, you write you're in VM now, so you definitely know SH404SEF module. Using this it's possible to open every single link (whether category or product) and set an alias (or aliases if more than one), such that every alias will point out to your URL. As far as I understand, I now need to do the same:

old URL: myshop.com/ch-de/wedding-decoration

new URL: myshop.com/de/wedding-deco

 

So I thought of some module in PrestaShop, where I can take my new URL and set an alias of my old URL.

 

See, I am going to transfer, but the domain will be the same. I will have different categorization and at least two languages. I will try to take over all the offline SEO we did to be at least on the first Google SERP page. So if the solution is not to redirect all my categories in apache server, what is it? How can I redirect every single URL if not with a module?

Edited August 27, 2013 by lionna (see edit history)

[billkou]

Hi guys

thanks for your input! That was exactly my concern: how do I redirect every single page from PrestaShop to old VM? Billkou, you write you're in VM now, so you definitely know SH404SEF module. Using this it's possible to open every single link (whether category or product) and set an alias (or aliases if more than one), such that every alias will point out to your URL. As far as I understand, I now need to do the same:

old URL: myshop.com/ch-de/wedding-decoration

new URL: myshop.com/de/wedding-deco

 

So I thought of some module in PrestaShop, where I can take my new URL and set an alias of my old URL.

 

See, I am going to transfer, but the domain will be the same. I will have different categorization and at least two languages. I will try to take over all the offline SEO we did to be at least on the first Google SERP page. So if the solution is not to redirect all my categories in apache server, what is it? How can I redirect every single URL if not with a module?

 

Hello

 

Yes I use sh404sef but not for SEO, but I know how it works very well.

 

If you want a good solution for the simple redirects ( categories are much simpler than products because they are a lot less usually ) then I advise you to have someone make the redirects on apache/nginx so that no mysql queries and modules are interfering. This way you will minimize the load as well and any hiccups/problems caused by the module's behavior because the redirects are always going to work for they are in the webserver's level.

 

Now, for the products, it just depends on how many of them you have and if it's worth the hassle. The results on Google are not dependant only on the url's but on the page content, meta, h1 tags etc so you have to make sure the new page is at least as good as your previous one in terms of optimization if not better.

 

You could try exporting the URL's on an excel sheet and have two columns, old and new, and you could take all the old ones and modify them into the new ones using Excel and then importing them to Prestashop or even better into the database directly or even into the webserver's configuration.

 

That's the best I can think of at this moment!

 

P.S. Whatever you do, make sure that when your new website goes live, these issues are dealt with.

[lionna]

you could take all the old ones and modify them into the new ones using Excel and then importing them to Prestashop or even better into the database directly or even into the webserver's configuration

hi again

not sure what you mean here. Let's have an example.

my old URL: www.wedding-shop.com/ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss

my new URL: www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html

 

So what do I need to modify?

A perfect solution would be to create an alias www.wedding-shop.com/ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss for the URL www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html Like that, every user that has found my old indexed URL will be redirected to the new one, right?

[billkou]

Well, I think you're talking about aliases into sh404sef right? If so, then it's useless because these aliases won't work once you move to Prestashop.

 

I was talking about modifying the url's in Excel then import them into Prestashop or into the apache/nginx configuration so that you don't get 404 errors.

 

I might be wrong or may have misunderstood what you said though.

[ajensen27]

hi again

not sure what you mean here. Let's have an example.

my old URL: www.wedding-shop.com/ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss

my new URL: www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html

 

So what do I need to modify?

A perfect solution would be to create an alias www.wedding-shop.com/ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss for the URL www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html Like that, every user that has found my old indexed URL will be redirected to the new one, right?

 

Lionna, all you have to do is in the .htaccess file of your Prestashop store (above # ~~start~~ Do not remove this comment, Prestashop will keep automatically the code outside this comment when .htaccess will be generated again), create a line for each redirect you want.

 

Example:

Redirect /ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss http://www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html

 

More info on .htaccess redirects https://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/242/How+do+I+redirect+my+site+using+a+.htaccess+file%3F

 

This has worked flawlessly for our site and we haven't lost much SERP at all.

[billkou]

Lionna, all you have to do is in the .htaccess file of your Prestashop store (above # ~~start~~ Do not remove this comment, Prestashop will keep automatically the code outside this comment when .htaccess will be generated again), create a line for each redirect you want.

 

Example:

Redirect /ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss http://www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html

 

More info on .htaccess redirects https://kb.mediatemp...taccess+file%3F

 

This has worked flawlessly for our site and we haven't lost much SERP at all.

 

Does this work on any server such as nginx? Is this independent from the normal .htaccess and applies only to Prestashop?

[ajensen27]

ahh missed the part that this was nginx and not apache. I used this tool (http://winginx.com/htaccess) to convert my htaccess example above to nginx and this is the result.

 

# nginx configuration
location /ch-de/Griffschleifen/Griffschleife-weiss {
 rewrite ^(.*)$ http:// www.wedding-shop.com/de/home/9-griffschleife.html redirect;
}

[Gomlers]

ajensen: Don't know if you get an email for pm's, but a pm is sent you.

[Detelin Markov]

Can you give me some advice for new version of my site: bijutaniki.com

Thanks