migration ps 1.5 > thirtybees friendly urls and seo

[annafjmorris]

Hi, we have migrated our store in a staging area and I working on it with the designers. One thing I was really excited to see is that the stupid prestashop url's issue has been fixed already in thirtybees. Before, in prestashop, everytime we made a change to a product prestashop would change the URL slightly. I can't imagine Google etc cope well with this behaviour.

One thing that worries me about this, however, is that effectively all of our product page URLs will be changing all at once when we make the store live. All the store.com/a-product-56/ URLS will change to store.com/a-product/

I'm a bit worried that this is going to really mess with our organic site visits from search engines for a while, as it's almost like we are wiping away all our products and replacing them with new ones. After all, many of our products haven't been edited in a long time so the url's will have been the same for a long time.

Does anyone know what we should expect? Are we going to be looking at a big dive in organic traffic for a few months?

Thanks for reading x

[yaniv14]

You can use the same url's in TB like you used to in PS. And maybe you can start making some 301's little by little until you cover/change all your urls. But at the beginning just keep it the same so you won't loose google history.

[MockoB]

According google it shouldn't be a problem if you use 301 redirect. But it should be done mentally for every single URL in your shop I believe because you are migrating from 1.5. I am also interested about it so if you have any success please share your experience.

[annafjmorris]

So it sounds like you are both saying yes, this is going to be a problem?

[Baarssen]

do you have products with id's and the same name? Like

store.com/1-product store.com/2-product store.com/3-product

Or is it like this: store.com/1-producta store.com/2-productb store.com/3-productc

[Baarssen]

I ask this because if it is like what i first mentioned google will pick up your old urls with id as duplicate urls i guess. Normally the id's are a prefix for every product in the old way, so if i understand you your products have the same name's and the id's make the difference. Do i understand?

[MockoB]

I meant manually not mentally in my previous post, it's my tablet guilt. @Baarssen i don't believe anyone would use same structure like your first example. But it wouldn't be problem to use 301 also and choose new name.

[annafjmorris]

@Baarssen said in migration ps 1.5 > thirtybees friendly urls and seo: >

Or is it like this: store.com/1-producta store.com/2-productb store.com/3-productc

Like that one.

This is my store: ethical-pets.co.uk/

This is my staging site: [email protected]@n.apc.or@g (Remove @'s)

[MockoB]

You understand it correctly @Baarssen but if you use such URL structure google complains about it, no matter those ids.

[annafjmorris]

I can imagine it happens in some cases like

Dog-food-brand-a-5kg Dog-food-brand-a-10kgDog-food-brand-a-15kg

But in my case we use a drop-down to choose bag size

[Baarssen]

Ah ok, in that case i think Nemops module can help. It helped me out when switching form id's to clean urls without changin each single product

[annafjmorris]

Got a link?

[Baarssen]

http://store.nemops.com/seo/29-prestashop-seo-booster.html#.WXOtioiLSUk

I dont know if it its thisone because i used anotherone, but you can ask nemops for help. He's the person who knows everything about this matter, and also thirtybees developer

[MockoB]

Nemo's module does the same, 301 redirect. Of course considering that thirty bees already has clean urls in the core. @annafjmorris those # numbers when you choose size with the drop down doesn't matter, they are not indexed, and if they accidentally got indexed you can use tool in webmaster tools to exclude them from the search index.

[annafjmorris]

Hi, I don't actually have numbers like that in my shop, I was just making up an example. So, what do we conclude, when we replace the old nasty prestashop URLs with nice clean thirtybees ones, do we need to redirect or will google cope without?

[Baarssen]

i thought i saw id numbers in your old shop, or is that also a testshop

[annafjmorris]

All the numbers are generated by prestashop I think. In the staging site there are non at all, the only change is the update and migration.

[Baarssen]

so the old urls dont have id numbers, well then you dont have to be worried at all

[MockoB]

If you don't use redirect you wil loose your positions in google! So definitely don't forget to use redirect for every single URL on your site!

[annafjmorris]

Ok, great thanks ?

[Guest]

Make sure you're new sitemap is submitted to Google. Also some people swear by using the 'fetch as Google and submit to index' in Google Search Console to instantly index the url. I use it myself but I don't know if it's true anymore if it's worth doing but the sitemap is the most important part. Also do the sitemap in Bing webmaster tools.