Thread: Will I lose all URLs and current search engine rankings if I switch to ASP.netStrFrnt

Hi have a current retail site that uses PDG as the back end. I have used an earlier version of aspdotnetstorefront at my previous employer. My current employer I believe is afraid to lose our current rankings all over the search engine worlds if we were to do a redesign and switch to the obvious much better software with aspdotnet is. We current rank on the first page for MANY of our best selling items and I understand his concerns. We have been told by other SEO people that we'd lose all our URL rankings and we'd drop off until google and such were to recognize us again and build our way back up. Is there a way to build a new site with aspdotnet and for us NOT to lose all our hard work we've done in terms of search engines ranking us? I understand the MUCH BETTER abilities and functions that aspdotnet can bring to the table. The lose of search engine rankings seems to be our biggest concerns. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated.

The best way to ensure that users and search engines are redirected to your new store’s page’s, is to complete a server-side 301 redirect. This will push the old URLs to the new ones, therefore preserving your current search engine ranking. This redirect should be completed for every page on your old site, every old page should have a new corresponding page. A 301 status code will tell Google and other search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new location.

301 redirects should only be used when you are migrating your store permanently. One level is ideal, so try not to complete multiple levels of redirects. If a URL might be undone in the future, you should complete a 302 redirect (temporary redirect).

But is there a limit to how many redirects you can do? Can you complete too many? The answer is no, Google will look at as many pages as they are willing to crawl on the old domain. If they see a 301 they will put it in the queue to crawl at the new location and process it.

To implement a redirect, contact your host prior to the launch of your new site. We recommend running your current site through a sitemap generator such as GSiteCrawler (http://gsitecrawler.com) to pull every URL you currently have. In an Excel spreadsheet, save the list of old URLs in one column and create the new list of corresponding URLs in a second column. Provide this information to your host so they can set up the redirects for your new store.

It's not worth it. Not in a million years for aspdotnetstorefront.

2.5 years ago we moved from a Classic ASP website to ASPDNSF and applied 301s to all of our old pages. 1 week later we dropped off the face of Google. It was worrying times. Some say we were the victim of the Google Sandbox Effect. Exactly 3 months later we came out the other side. At that time our online sales were about 16K per month. Now, they're about 130K pm.

If you can somehow keep the URL's the same, that would be the best case scenario. If not, there will likely be fluctuations with the redesign, but 301 redirects should help mitigate that somewhat. You will still have fluctuations and there's really no way to know for sure how much this will affect you.

301 redirects are a must for switching URL's but with a big ecommerce site, that can be quite a chore.