Dear Merchants,

We have scheduled soon our migration to V7 platform and have a question for merchants who was migrated before (and using live V7 site for some time already) in regards to SEO ranking after migration. We had our V4 store www.1888toys.com for 3 years and have some good search results, which we do not want to loose.

Have you noticed that you lost your ranking and organic search results positions for your main keyword phrases, after your old URLs were redirected? Is Google still brings your pages even after redirection? Have you lost Page Rank for categories pages, since URL is actually different from which Page Rank was initially assigned? Have you noticed reduce in the traffic from organic searches because of the migration? How your new URLs are doing, were they indexed and after how long? I know that MC says that we should not see any downside, but this question is for real people who 'already did it' and migrated to V7 after they used V4 before??? We are waiting for coming Christmas season and are pretty concern in regards to all matters above, since our main traffic source is our good organic ranking in Yahoo and Google.

Please reply, we really appreciate your feedback.

are you still using the old seo catalog?

There is much more going on here behind the scenes than the migration. The following link is to the Google World Blog that discusses recent changes in the way that they give pagerank and organic search results. It's a long read but interesting how Google is Migrating itself away from Social Media links to bare bones relevant search results.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3963910.htm

I didn't see a link to the old seo catalog on your site, but just in case I missed it and you are using it, something to bear in mind. Of course, if you aren't using it, ignore everything that follows (IMG:http://forums.networksolutions.com/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

we didn't wait for NS to do our V4 migration as their timeline didn't work for us, so instead we opted to sign up for v7, recreate the store and then do the switch.

we knew the seo catalog was defunct in v7, and many had stopped using it way before v7 was announced, but we kept it going. when we knew we were definitely going to v7, we removed the link from our site to the catalog and turned it off.

nothing changed for about 3 months, but then boom. End of Sep 08 and we got slapped with a -50 penalty right across the board from Google. Traffic dropped about 90% overnight and it took 3 months just to get the -50 lifted and when it did, many of our rankings didn't recover. it's taken over 9 months, a lot of money and effort to get our rankings back.

the reason?

in short, the de-indexing of all the seo catalog pages was to much of a dramatic change for G, hence the penalty. G saw it as we had lost 50% of our site, when it reality we hadn't.

so if you can, make sure you 301 as much of that seo catalog as possible, we didn't.

if you want a more specific explanation as to why we got the -50, just let me know.

I do not remember now because its been about a year ago we switched but there were some instructions for you to run a site map of the new site and the old site and somehow link them together. We did whatever it said to do exactly and it worked and we only had a small dip in traffic for about 2 weeks. If you have the migration instructions read them over and look for that.

We migrated the end of last summer. We did some planned site upgrades and re-freshening while we were at it. On balance our traffic is up and so are the search rankings. We still have not maxed out what we can do with the v7 site seo wise; we work on filling in additional info as time allows. We put a lot LOT of work into the migration and it is paying off, server errors aside...