Moving from Actinic to Oscommerce

[bekyed]

Hello.

I am moving my site from Actinic to Oscommerce.
I have 3000 products – What’s the most realistic solution.
.htaccess with 3000 redirects or any other ideas please?
I dont really want to lose search engine positions at all.

Thanks.

Wayne.

[lorax]

whuff... you're going to see a change no matter what because of many factors, the biggest being a change in the underlying code structure of the site. Hopefully your META Data will either remain intact or change for the better.

I would NOT use htaccess for those 3000 products. I assume those products are categorized. How many categories and do the categories have sub categories? If so, then you could set htaccess up to filter requests for the major categories and send them to a PHP handler that takes care of the redirects (the script can be cached). Using htaccess this way means you'll need to look for some common URI formatting that will not exist on the new cart.

[akmac]

I did a similar thing 3 years ago, and used 301 redirects in my htaccess. I redirected all my product categories, and the single product pages that were ranking very well. About 200 redirects I would guess in the htaccess file on the old site (I was changing the domain name as well). I left the old site with redirects live until the rank had transferred to the new domain-about 3 months.

Not just like your situation as you're keeping the same domain-which should make the rank transition shorter.

[bekyed]

Thank you for your help.

It seems this is going to be a bit of a suck it and see situation, anything is better than actinic though.

Cheers.

Wayne.

[enigma1]

With osC there is an seo module that among other things uses a redirection table via the MySQL database. You could use it to redirect each of the old links into the new ones. You could search the oscommerce contributions for SEO-G. And before making the transition would be best to decide on the new url format, otherwise there is no point if you change it from the stock urls to something else later on.