Firstly it is important to remember that Google simply crawls your URLs and places them in their index, as long as they are not blocked in the robots.txt file or noindexed. Changing all your URLs will actually double your pages in Google’s index and result in massive duplicate content issues and 404 errors, resulting in loss of rankings. Google places the power on your page on the URL, so changing your URLs can result in a massive loss of traffic if it is not completed correctly.

So what do you do? Well it depends?
Below I have detailed a few SEO and programming tips and tricks.

SEO

• Firstly you should always 301 redirect the old pages to the new to transfer the power of the pages, and ensure the user is taken to the relevant page
• Keep the same page names if possible, if they are relevant
• Test the redirects using a header check program like http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/
• Use Google Analytics to check your long tail traffic. 301 redirects take some time to transfer so this will give you an idea of how much traffic you could lose
• Is your site old or new? An older site may well have generated lots of natural links, hence it is more important to redirect the old pages
• Don’t redirect the pages too many times as Google wont be able to follow too many redirects
• Always ensure the pages are 301 redirected and not 302 redirected

Programming

Implementing SEO URLs and redirecting the pages is a different task depending on the system you use. Most open source ecommerce systems will have some contribution that will perform the task.

• Ecommerce – If you use one of the open source systems such as oscommerce or Prestashop simply download the module and test test test.
• Wordpress – Wordpress permalinks option will change the links and 301 redirect the old page
• Bespoke systems will require some specific programming, this can be achieved by adding mod rewrites into the .htaccess file

Conclusion
Think! How large and old is your site, and which system do you use. Always ensure all the pages redirect, many programmers make the mistake of changing the URLs but not completing the redirects. Be aware you may lose listings before they return stronger, this is due to the time it takes Google to pick up the old links and transfer the power over. Always consult a professional SEO company before trying to change your URLs, as mistakes can take longer to fix than the actual job.

On a few occasions I have come accross a situation where I needed to install a Wordpress blog installation to an ecommerce website. The main problem here is integrating the two systems. It is often difficult to make the sidebar in Wordpress dynamic with the website, leaving the sidebar static often leaves the blog and site navigation different as categories in the site have changed. This can result in 404 errors if you don’t manually change the Wordpress navigation.

There is however an easy solution to the problem. You can create a dynamic RSS feed from your ecommerce site that simply contains the category name and URL. After you have created this RSS feed yo should then install the ‘advanced RSS widget’ for Wordpress. This widget allows you to add any RSS feed into the sidebar.

Once installed you can add the location of the latest categries RSS feed into the appropriate sidebar. This will now display a list of categories from the site that is dynamic, all you need to do now is style it up in CSS. Now when you change your site your category navigation will update.

Problem fixed!