Gift Focus - Mar/Apr 2018 (Issue 106)

migration wrong doesn’t bear thinking about, which is why we spend inordinate amounts of time making sure everything works seamlessly. Plan, plan… then plan some more So you need a plan, and if you remember the immortal words of Baldrick in Blackadder , you’d better make it a ‘cunning one’! I’m not going to cover changing a domain name here (for instance if you want to change from oldsite.com to newsite.com for your online shop’s domain) as that requires special attention and planning. The following guide is for those moving their website to a new e-commerce platform. Firstly, and I really can’t stress this enough – make sure you capture a full list of the current pages in your website. This means should the worst happen and your current website hosts switch your website off (perhaps because they know you’re leaving) you still have a full record of the pages that were there before. There are several ways you can get a full listing of the pages in your website, however, probably the simplest method is to mine the data from the current sitemap in the website. If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, find a sitemap generator online – type ‘sitemap generator’ into Google, there are many free ones available. What you need is a full list in .xml or .csv format, this can then be opened in Excel or another spreadsheet program quite easily, giving you a full, structured list of the ‘old’ website page URIs. Once you have this, you are ready to marry up with the page URIs from your new website. This is where it all gets a bit tedious – and why migrating a website can be a complex and time consuming job. If you don’t know for certain what the URIs in the new website are going to be, then you need to carefully think what the effect of the e-commerce software structure is going to have on the page titles and work this all out accordingly for each and every category and product page in the website. We use an Excel plugin called Fuzzy Lookup to help with the process of marrying up old and new pages within the website. This can speed things up considerably if the past and present page titles in the website make sense and are unique. Unfortunately, you can never rely on this, so most of the time if we have to go right down to the product level manual matching is required, a very time consuming task. What you end up with is a large number of permanent redirect directives, which can be placed either directly into server setup files or (on some types of servers) website level files that tell search engines and browsers that the pages they are trying to find have been moved somewhere else. These directives are called redirects and are of the form redirect 301 /oldcategory/oldfile.html /newcategory/ newfile (this is an example for an Apache .htaccess file, others are different). A redirect? As its name suggests, a redirect shows any user interested (be it a search engine or a browser) that a resource has been moved somewhere else. For search engines, by far the best type of redirect to use are permanent or 301 redirects. This type of redirect tells the search engine the resource that is being looked for has been permanently moved somewhere else, so in theory all of the relevance that the old page has should be moved as well to the new page. In reality, migrated pages do lose some relevance in the short term, so rankings may take a bit of a tumble, but if the actual content on the page stays the same and all other factors (like external linking) are unaffected, then rankings will eventually bounce back. Belts and braces Finally, when a full set of page level permanent redirects are in place, contact webmasters of the most important links coming into the website and inform them of the change. If links are coming into the homepage of the external website then this obviously doesn’t need any action (as the homepage URI doesn’t change), however, if you have strong links coming into category and product pages this last task is well worth doing. We normally carefully vet linking pages and have even offered updated, more relevant text for pages linking to our client sites, this increases the relevance of the pages linking to our client’s website and means those links are even stronger. Migration is something that many with retail websites think of at the last moment. It’s easy to see that, for those with previous websites, this is something to be carefully planned and budgeted for. Believe me, search engines will thank you for your efforts, as will your bank manager! David Fairhurst is Head of Creative Online Marketing at Intelligent Retail. David has been involved with search engine optimisation (SEO) and web development since 1999 and has spoken at many different retail and SEO conferences including Spring Fair and SES London. Call David on +44 (0)845 680 0126 . giftfocus 91 retail technology