I doubt that the shopping cart will have much or any impact on your ranking in Google. If your product pages still remain at the same URLs and with broadly the same content and structure then that is what Google will be looking at.
sorry for the late replies… this job was put on hold…
So i would have to make a list (in excel) of all my product page, category page and info page urls. Then when the new site is up I would have to match those urls up to the new ones and then create ‘all’ the 301 redirect code.
To answer your question about transfer of page rank, when you do a 301 redirect most of the page rank transfers to the new URL, but a small portion of it is lost.
Matt Cutts: That’s a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).
Assuming you can import into the new system and hold the same product / category IDs you just need to figure out the mapping structure of your old categories & products, that of the new ones and use a mod-rewrite rule to redirect them.
If you can’t keep the IDs the same you’ll risk more than seo rankings, links will break, so while it’s a pain you’d have to manually build redirects for each page.
You keep the same domain name, sure, but if the addresses of all the other pages are changing that’s something you need to deal with. Google doesn’t just index your home page, it indexes all of your pages … so you need to make sure that all of the old URLs still work.
If there was some kind of regular pattern then you could automate it with mod_rewrite. But if you’ve got to go from numbers to words, there’s no alternative but to list them all one by one.
repeated all the way from 1 to whatever until you’ve listed them all. With a bit of copy and paste, it’s no big deal. If you’ve already got a list of IDs against product names in some other format like Word, you can use the search-and-replace function to generate the code, but the fact is that somewhere, somehow, you’re going to have to write down all the numbers and all their replacements.
