Maintaining good SEO in migrated site

[Lauren]

Hello everyone,

We are in the process of migrating our old Merchant 2 store over to Merchant 5. We currently get good organic rankings in google and yahoo on a number of our products. I know that we can save our new pages in a mm2 folder... but other than that, what can we do to make sure that we maintain or even improve our search engine results with our new store?

I've read about several modules, etc... which ones are most recommended?

It has also been suggested that we talk to a SEO expert for their expertise... I'm looking for user suggestions...

Thanks,

Lauren
www.filingstore.com

[dotCOM_host]

Once you are done setting up your MM5 store, rename the old folder in which MM2 resided (or delete it, if you don't need to keep an online backup), and change all server paths in MM5 to use the same directory as the old store. This way all your organiz links on search engines will remain the same and you won't lose any traffic from that.

As far as improving your SEO in the new store - Merchant Optimzier from Phosphor Media does a great job of generating static HTML pages which work well for SEO purposes, and which you can further tweak if you really want to. MOOGLE generates Google-friendly XML site maps. There's a few other modules you can find as well, all on MivaCentral, that deal with SEO, or help with SEO related projects.

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

While there are several modules that will help with the site being search friendly, there is no substitute for hiring an SEO expert who is also an expert with MIVA Merchant for the knowledge of the ever changing ranking criteria.

Contact us offlist if you would like some recommendation.

[jason - jmh web services]

Hello everyone,

We are in the process of migrating our old Merchant 2 store over to Merchant 5. We currently get good organic rankings in google and yahoo on a number of our products. I know that we can save our new pages in a mm2 folder... but other than that, what can we do to make sure that we maintain or even improve our search engine results with our new store?

I've read about several modules, etc... which ones are most recommended?

It has also been suggested that we talk to a SEO expert for their expertise... I'm looking for user suggestions...

Thanks,

Lauren
www.filingstore.com (http://www.filingstore.com)
Just ask your host to do either do a 301 permanent redirect from old directory to new directory or change back to the old directory after you go live. If you change back to old directory, make sure you ban search engines from indexing the new/temp directory.
Ultimate SEO links (http://www.jmhonline.net/usl5) is great for making your pages appear static which helps with faster indexing. Template suite (http://www.jmhonline.net/tsuite) gives you access to the category tree and allows you to do custom layouts for different types of products and categories. Template Data Feed (http://www.jmhonline.net/tfeed) does google sitemaps, froogle/googlebase, yahoo site submit, shopzilla, and any other feed you want. Swap Link (http://www.jmhonline.net/swap5) does a great regular sitemap. You might try MetaGeneral (http://www.metageneral.com).

[lbdesign]

I bought Template Data Feed and used it with Google for Google Base and Google Sitemaps. But what do I do with the Yahoo sitemap that it outputs? I can't find a spot on the Yahoo site to submit it. Or is it only used for the $299 "expedited" submission service?

[jason - jmh web services]

I bought Template Data Feed and used it with Google for Google Base and Google Sitemaps. But what do I do with the Yahoo sitemap that it outputs? I can't find a spot on the Yahoo site to submit it. Or is it only used for the $299 "expedited" submission service?

That is for the yahoo shopping engine. Template date feed (http://www.jmhonline.net/tfeed) is missing the yahoo site submit feed.

[lbdesign]

Thank you Jason.
Has anyone built their own Yahoo site submit template for use with the Template Data Feed module and wants to share? Or any other useful data feed template?
best,
--Lee

[Brandon MUS]

What is the link structure of the old mm2 store? When we moved from Miva 4 to 5, I used a couple rules in my htaccess file to 301 redirect (permanent redirect) the screens to Miva 5. All of my old links still work.

something like this (you can adapt it to include more screens, etc.):
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=(PROD|LRGE) [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Product_Code=([a-zA-Z0-9-_]+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^Merchant2/merchant.mv?(.*)$ /mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=%1 [R=301,L]