Switching to Shopify.com and SEO effects

9 replies
I have a wordpress site that is generating traffic and orders. I'm not that much of a designer and I think if I cleaned up my site, I could have more orders come in. My question is if I switch to shopify.com will that hurt my SEO?

Clint
Crape Myrtle Guy
#effects #seo #shopifycom #switching
  • Profile picture of the author san2hnl
    Yes it will, unless you create a 301 redirect for every page. I'm in the same boat right now. I have a Wordpress site that I want to convert to Shopify, but I'm scared to lose the organic traffic I've built up.

    I'm probably just going to install the Easy Digital Downloads plugin and be done with it.
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    • Profile picture of the author PPG19
      Originally Posted by san2hnl View Post

      Yes it will, unless you create a 301 redirect for every page. I'm in the same boat right now. I have a Wordpress site that I want to convert to Shopify, but I'm scared to lose the organic traffic I've built up.

      I'm probably just going to install the Easy Digital Downloads plugin and be done with it.
      Few years ago 301 redirects resulted in around a 10% to 20% loss of PageRank.
      Now Google has changed this policy and welcomes 301 redirects (mainly because they want everybody to switch to https) but doing so it still carries a little risk.

      If you 301 redirect a page to an exact copy of that page, and the only thing that changes is the URL, then in theory you may expect no traffic loss but if you are redirecting to something completely different than expect changes in your traffic flow.

      All redirects still carry a degree of risk.
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  • Profile picture of the author SunnyDelight
    Im not really sure. You probably have to test and see. SEO can be a bit tricky and unpredictable. Unless someone has done the same as you i doubt anyone can give you a concrete and clear answer. Best of luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author OnlineStoreHelp
    Originally Posted by CrapeMyrtleGuy View Post

    I have a wordpress site that is generating traffic and orders. I'm not that much of a designer and I think if I cleaned up my site, I could have more orders come in. My question is if I switch to shopify.com will that hurt my SEO?

    Clint
    Crape Myrtle Guy
    I did a quick walk through of how to set up the 301 Redirects in shopify if it helps you

    Magento Go - Keeping Search Engine Ranking in New Cart

    I did this when Magento was shutting down but its no different moving from wordpress to shopify as well.

    NOTE: Looking at your current website, using a dedicated shopping cart will make your life a lot easier compared to just PayPal buttons.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dan DaSilva
    Interesting topic. I am about to start a new project and wanna start with shopify right away. Does anybody have experience when it comes to SEO for a shopify ecommerce site? Is it a script as favorable for SEO as WP?

    Thanks for some feedback!

    Best,
    Dan
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  • Profile picture of the author Brent Stangel
    Originally Posted by CrapeMyrtleGuy View Post

    I have a wordpress site that is generating traffic and orders. I'm not that much of a designer and I think if I cleaned up my site, I could have more orders come in. My question is if I switch to shopify.com will that hurt my SEO?

    Clint
    Crape Myrtle Guy
    I don't see a thing wrong with your site. I am an avid gardener and if I were in the market I wouldn't have any problem buying from your site.

    I think you see problems that don't exist.

    Brent
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    • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
      Originally Posted by Brent Stangel View Post

      I think you see problems that don't exist.

      Brent
      Unfortunately thats not true. The Op is wise to consider the problems that may arise. Just on WF there have been five or so in the last few months who have had traffic and rankings tank after either switching cart software or implementing https

      Its a very real problem which professional SEOs have been doing a lot of work on recently because of Google's suggestion to change to https

      You will NOT see the problem when you are looking at the site. In time all your new URls will be recrawled by google sure. In the interim it will cause traffic to go down because some previously ranking pages are not indexed at all. However FAAAR more dangerous is the issues with the incoming links.

      Most recently we did some work for a client (designer/developer) whose own client had lost most of its traffic after changing designs and platforms. the site looked great but the redirects had not been done correctly (or they had missed some folders).

      They had lost a big chunk of their incoming links that were helping them previously to get rankings. They are presently fixing that (we just consulted because they knew generally how to do redirects) but yes - some potential business was lost.

      So its important and a LOT of people are screwing it up and tearing their heads out trying to figure out why traffic is gone. Google will never be able to change the URl of the links coming into your site even though it will recrawl your new pages. You have to do the redirects correctly or you WILL lose links and traffic.

      AN additional consideration for carts is the tech they were built with

      If you go from oldschool asp pages those links have a aspx extension. Coldfusion has their own (yep there are still those kinds of sites around) and even php used to use php extensions on their urls more than today.

      The redirect has to be specific to handle that or the incoming links are broken and no benefit in the SE algorythm is given to the page to rank.
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    • Profile picture of the author PPG19
      Originally Posted by Brent Stangel View Post

      I don't see a thing wrong with your site. I am an avid gardener and if I were in the market I wouldn't have any problem buying from your site.

      I think you see problems that don't exist.

      Brent
      There is definitely room for improvement...
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  • Profile picture of the author businessmanic
    Do the 301 redirect and it shouldn't be a problem. Here is a great article about SEO for eCommerce websites: http://myinternetmarketingmagazine.b...-complete.html
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