Redirect From Old Site To New Site

[devlin]

I have an eCommerce site that was recently moved from one host to another while maintaining the same domain name. It was also moved to zencart from a different cart therefore the file structure and URL are different.

Basically it was an emergency rebuild.

The move took place a couple of weeks ago but has not been indexed for the new pages. All searches reveal the old URL which now longer exist so I am getting very little traffic and a lot of 404's.

Traffic and sales have taken a drastic nose dive. I need to get the pages redirected somehow.

I don't have access to the old host to create redirects so I'm a bit flummoxed.

I was thinking maybe creating some new pages with URL the same as those that are 404ing and redirecting to the new pages. The old URL structure is \item_#\page-url.htm (item_# would be an item number from the old dbase)

I'm also thinking a sitemap on this site would help. Is their a recommended module?

Any ideas please? I'm open to any and all constructive ideas

thanks

[sportbiker]

Having experienced the same thing here at my job when we switched from one ecommerce platform to Zen Cart, here's a tip and an afterthought:

Write a 404 Redirect
This AUTOMATICALLY redirects search engines, as well as customers from a broken page to somewhere else so they don't see a "404" error, or better said, so they never land on a "404 Error" page at all! Do you have an .htaccess file in your store's root folder? Add this line to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

This means any 404 error will automatically redirect to your homepage.

But what if you want a custom 404 Error page with your logo? You could write your own page, call it "404.html" or "404.php" and place it in your shopping cart's root folder and add this line to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

Although one could argue whether it was right or not to do it that way, we opted for our own custom redirect page that made the customer feel everything was just fine and that they were still "in our website" and there wasn't some secret internet glitch that would cause them to lose confidence. So, we said "Oops" with our own logo and added a timer to automatically redirect them to the homepage after 5 seconds. The whole concept of a redirect really helps because it means their internet journey won't end on a broken page.

Now — I'm not an expert, but it's worth it to say that this might not work on some server types, but most servers are Apache/Linux, so I'm wagering you're in the majority and this would work for you.

AFTERTHOUGHT
In my experience, I have dealt with all kinds of clients, sites, both standard and ecommerce, and my clients have asked the same questions about making such major changes and how the search engines have 'lost' them in the mix. But that's always temporary. If you're the one who's neck is on the line for results, you just have to be honest and confident about the facts.

If you build the store, do it right, and drive the traffic there, the search engines will pick it up in time. I can say that I managed to get my company to get away form Joomla and switch to Zen Cart. For a few months, our links were bad on the search engines. However, I can honestly say that a year later, our sales are up 1000%~1500% - no kidding. The search engines have caught up with us and our target keywords have moved us up higher on the search results.

My point is — you should make your site, do it right, drive traffic there (sales, email blasts, etc.) and wait patiently for the search engines to catch up with you. Your situation is not unique and it can feel frustrating, but the power of Zen Cart and doing your site right has enormous benefits and the search engines will reward you kindly!

[devlin]

Thanks sportbiker, worked like a charm. No glitch at all, straight to the home page.

I will probably expand on it later to send old url to specific areas.

With reference to the Afterthought, I understand the comment but in this instance it was completely out of our hands. The old site was gone (beware host resellers without a disaster plan)

We were called in by the owner to do a rush rebuild using Zencart. Luckily the owner had the foresight to keep a backup downloaded.

thanks for getting back to me. Appreciated.

[sportbiker]

Your welcome! Glad it worked!

[dgent]

You can go far better than this.

Use this online generator tool: http://seo-website-designer.com/HtAc...ing-ToolResult

And then you can make specific old urls that google is ranking to redirect to a specific page on your website, not just the home page.

For instance the code below would make ...

oscommerce/index.php&main_page=shopping_basket redirect to zencartstore/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart

Site generated code below - Put this in your .htaccess

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^main_page=shopping_basket$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^oscommerce/index\.php$ /zencartstore/index.php?main_page=shopping_cart [R=301,NE,NC,L]

Also, this will tell Google that your new site is the new content to be indexed in place of the old, and will eventually get rid of the old links.