Redirect Help

[preciousbags]

Hello All

I am moving my site back to Magento and wanted some advice on redirection

I have for example my current site category page about shoes: www.example.com/collections/shoes

I want to move this page and all its content, meta title, meta description etc to my new magento category page: www.newdomain.com/shoes

I am worried about duplicate content if i copy the exact page description and meta information.

Can i keep the exact data from the old site and type it up on the new site? Is the way forward a redirect?

Any advice is appreciated

 

[WebDesires]

Hello and Welcome,
What you are worried about is null, duplicate content means duplicate content, not moved content.

As long as your new site immediately replaces your old one you are not causing any duplicate content issues, and Google will not get confused that you are, even if it keeps your old pages indexed and indexes new pages, because it knows that it may have outdated content so will not penalize you until it has finished processing your new structure and drops the old content.

As far as using redirects, yes you should redirect each important category and product to the new locations where possible, my advise is to always do redirects for your most used links, for instance if you have other important sites linking to specific places, make sure those redirects are in place.

You can even go as far as to have a 404 logging plugin in your magento so you can pickup any other persistently used old links as you move forward.

Final Tip: Once your new site is live tell google to crawl your homepage and index the page and all sub pages using Webmaster Tools to get the re-indexing rolling.

 

[preciousbags]

I only really want the content and meta data of the current site rather then redirecting it, as I only have had the current site up for a few months.

Would you still advise to redirect it, or just copy the content I need and close the curewn site?

 

[fisicx]

I think you said in an other thread you had a shopify site. If that is the case you can't do what you are suggesting. You need to export all the date from shopify to magento. There are tools you can use to do this for you. for example: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Migrate-All-Data-from-Shopify-to-Magento-in/

What you can't do is redirect (301) from each shopify page to your new site. Or at least there doesn't appear to be an easy way to do this.

 

[preciousbags]

Ah that makes things complicated. I didn't want to pass any juice over from the shopify to magento. Just literally the content. I only got as far as creating about 50 new pages, optimised well on the shopify.

I didn't want to lose that content. Am not to fussed about having a redirect in place unless it is required to get the content over?

Can I just not copy and paste the content over to the magento site? Or will that cause issues in Googles eyes

 

[fisicx]

It could do. Google will see both pages and decide which one it prefers and ignore the other. Or decide you have been a bit naughty and ignore both. Or just share the ranking and put both lower down the page. Ideally you want to close the shopify site and just have the magento site.

 

[preciousbags]

Yes will have just the magento site. I guess if I 301 redirect all pages from shopify to magento - that will avoid any issues with Google.

 

[fisicx]

Yes, but I don't think you can 301 from shopify to an external site.

 

[preciousbags]

Ah! Not looking good for us. Will have a google -see if i can find something

 

[antropy]

What you can't do is redirect (301) from each shopify page to your new site. Or at least there doesn't appear to be an easy way to do this.

Not from Shopify, so you point the domain at your hosting and then do the 301s from there with htaccess.

 

[preciousbags]

Thanks, is what i have outlined below the way to go forward.

i should start making a list of all the urls that i will need to redirect. Start to copy and paste the content from shopify url/page/product description etc to the relevant page on magento. Then point shopify domain to my own hosting. Create htaccess file and 301 previous shopify urls to the magento urls.

Does this also mean that i have to keep the shopify domain i was using, on my hosting permenantly for the forseeable future? As i have implemented a 301 redirect?

Does this sound about right? Again not that technical but always happy to give these things a go

 

[antropy]

With the 301 part, if you have a spreadsheet with a column for old and new, you can generate the htaccess rules here:
https://donatstudios.com/RewriteRule_Generator

 

[WebDesires]

It is perfectly feasible for you not to bother if you feel it will not affect anyone. The point of redirects is for old sites and old users to be able to get to where they used to go, but if the site was fairly new you do not need to worry.

It's entirely up to you, but as I said, as long as you get rid of your old site you can copy any data you like, it is yours!

 

[preciousbags]

So in essence - i could copy content over and just close the website down once done? It is as simple as that? The site was new - hardly any pages indexed apart from category pages.

 

[WebDesires]

yeah! But if the domain is changing you should add both sites to Webmaster tools, then when you shut down the old site tell Webmaster tools that you have moved domain.

 

[preciousbags]

I have both sites on webmasters within their own accounts already added and verified. Both sites are currently live. Shopify and Magento site.

It says on google

Before you request an address change
Prepare for you address change as follows:

Complete the actual content migration first.
Read our guidelines on moving a site with URL changes and make sure to complete key steps before submitting a change of address request.
Note: If you do not first set up 301-redirect directives, your change of address request will not work.

 

[WebDesires]

You may have to do a full redirect of the old domain to the new domain, even if you redirect everything to the homepage of your new site.