SEO/Urls after upgrading from 1.4 to 1.6

[71newyorker]

Hi developers,

 

We're about to upgrade (starting tomorrow most likely) our e-commerce website from v1.4.7 to v1.6.0.11

 

We have about 700 products i think.

 

When we upgrade to 1.6 we will be using a new url structure, different categories names etc so pretty much EVERY single URL will be different. That's alot of URLS   We're doing this because when we first launched the e-commerce website we did a bad job at naming the categories, sub categories and the general URL structure

My question is.... does anyone have a recommendation on the easiest way to redirect about 1000 urls after the upgrade? Is there a way of doing this in the upgrade itself? If we have to manually change all the URLS can some one recommend the best way to do this on a large scale?

 

Thank you for your help

James

 

 

 

 

Edited February 11, 2020 by 71newyorker
up (see edit history)

[71newyorker]

I would just like to add another question

 

if im changing url structure

 

examle i have /baby-bottles

 

and i want to put all products from /blue-bottles into /baby-bottles

 

now all the urls from products in the /blue-bottles category will be broken.

 

Is there a way i can in one go redirect ALL products in a category to a new category?

[mytheory.]

Hi,

 

A word of advice... if you've been running your site for some time and have gotten rankings from google (or other search engines) I wouldn't recommend changing the URL. To google, they may look at the "new" url structure as different new pages which may cause you to loose existing rankings. Google will try to rank those urls as a separate pages although we as humans know they are the same page and you will loose any link juice.

 

However, you can get around this by making sure the old urls redirect 301 (permanent) to your new urls (which should lead to the same pages). I suppose you can do this using .htaccess, but an easier method may be using a third party module.

 

Take a look into Presto-Changeo's Duplicate URL Redirect module. Contact their support to see if what your are trying to do will work with their module. By this I mean if your old url structure will still 301 redirect to the new url structure. They have awesome support so I advise you take advantage of that. www.presto-changeo.com

 

Personally, I try not to use redirect as much as possible, but if you need to then you will need to find a way to 301 redirect them.

 

HTH!

 

PS. I believe there is a way to also page changes in google webmaster tools. I'm not sure how effective they are though... I would recommend the redirects happen on your server side to ensure maximum potential.

Edited January 8, 2015 by mytheory. (see edit history)

[71newyorker]

Hi Mytheory,

 

Thank you for the input.

 

Yes we really don't want to be changing our URL structure trust me its NOT something we are doing just for small improvements its just when we started years ago we really did a very bad job with categorizing our store. It's terrible. So we really have to change unfortunately.

 

I was hoping our products urls would stay the same, as i thought we are using url/product name but it turns out we are using url/category/product name. As we are changing the category names this means these urls will now be invalid

 

THAT SAID, i just also noticed something, can you please advice me about this? This applies to any product i test it with

 

the page seems to redirect? Is that a redirect? if i remove the category from the url and there was no redirect then shouldnt i end up on a blank page? I guess thats a sign of hope right?

J

Edited February 11, 2020 by 71newyorker (see edit history)

[71newyorker]

One more thought. 

 

Is it possible we can just keep our category urls the same while turning them into a subcategory?

 

for example (these are made up urls) what we're actually/specifically trying to do is this...

 

We actually want to put urls 2,3,4 under url 1, so they will become subcategories. Is it possible that as sub categories they could keep the same url?

 

Like i said we dont actually want to change the urls, i was just under the impression we had to.

 

Thanks.

Edited February 11, 2020 by 71newyorker (see edit history)

[mytheory.]

Hi,

 

To answer your first question... yes it appears that the links WITHOUT categories are redirecting correctly. This is probably how it is set in your SEO & URL preferences in the BO.

 

If you google "redirect checker" and use one of those services it shows that the above link is a 301 redirect. Try it out.

 

For you second question, I think you would be better off just moving the categories using the "Category" section of the BO.

 

I'm not completely sure but I think by doing this your url structure won't change. My understanding (as limited as it may be) is that PS treats every category and subcategory as a category item (not 2 different items). So there aren't 2 different link structures for categories and subcategories; its just based on their ID. If true, this should mean that you could move the subcategories into categories, and categories to become subcategories.

 

In any case, I think it would probably be best to move your existing (sub)categories instead of creating new ones.

 

HTH!

Edited January 8, 2015 by mytheory. (see edit history)