Changing shopping cart == lose positioning?

how much will changing the cart affect our position in the serps?

[luejinX]

Hello,

Just a quick question here..

We have a site that has been around for a few years and has decent search engine positioning. We're currently using Miva 4.20 but want to switch to another cart that uses ASP.NET.

We have hundreds of categories, and pretty much every one is somewhere in the top 15 of search results.

Since the URLs will be different in the new cart, won't we lose our search engine positioning for each category and sub-category? Is there a way to make the move without losing it all?

Thanks!

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld,
You may not lose your positioning in the end but you can bet on disappearing from the indexes for a while as the spiders and algo figure out what you did to the pages. There are things you can do to minimize the loss of rankings but you will see change.

[luejinX]

Thank you for the quick response and information.

What kind of things can be done to minimize the loss of rankings?

Thank you

[MLHmptn]

301 every URL you have now to let the search engines find similar content at the very least. Then wait it out 2-3 months to regain a little trust from your brother Google.

[CarolSLC]

I second the previous post - 301 every page url that's currently ranked, even though it's a pain. We switched in March which changed our page url's - we were highly ranked before the move, and disappeared until I added the 301's. I've heard that if you 301, then google transfers the page rank from the old page to the new page, but I'm not guaranteeing that. It's taken a month or so, but we're showing up again, and often even higher than we were before. Our new url structure is much more seo friendly than with the old cart. I would recommend making the change a few months before your busy season if you can.

[ByronM]

I didn't bother 301.. we were getting great ranks, switched carts, hit the toilet and now above where we were before. I'm not sure 301 would have changed anything as we chose to switch carts for business reasons that were a necessity and worth the risk. If you only have a few pages/items 301 may work but i had 22k products listed and the differences of how products in multiple categories were listed in the prior cart to the new cart would have probably killed us with dupe content and other issues.

We just bit the bullet and planned for larger than normal ppc volume to keep things moving.