SERPS: Moving from one ecommerce package to another

[frostfire]

Hi,

We are moving our site from Acatalog to Magento.

How can we do this without disrupting our SERPs?

Do we need to set up 301 redirects for each pages?

regards
Chris

[tedster]

Yes, if your urls change, then in order to keep backlink juice and PageRank from getting lost, you need to use a 301 redirect from the old version to the new.

If your specific situation makes that a heavy-duty job, then consider only using 301 redirects for the urls that have external backlinks or lots of search engine traffic. Googlebot will crawl the new site structure over time to discover the rest, and you can submit an xml sitemap to help things along.

There is often a short term hiccup in Google traffic when you make a major change like this. My advice is to deploy the new version in a test environment first, and really debug everything you can find before you go live - especially canonical url issues [webmasterworld.com]. I've yet to see a redevelopment like this with no problems on the intial set-up.