moving AWS storefront advice

[devvy]

hi everyone,

I need some good advice.

I have a amazon shopping cart on my site and I have just updated to a new script in a different directory.

My problem is this: currently Google has indexed about 120K product pages in the old shopping cart directory.

I don't know what is the best way to make the move?

should I just delete the whole directory?
redirect the entire directory using a 301 to my new directory?
redirect the entire directory to amazon.com with my affiliate link?

One question I have is with a 301, what happens to all the old links currently in Google's index? Will they always be there? In the long run is that good for my site to have 120K pages of bad links. I worry that Google will only index so much of my site and that with so many pages, it won't index that much from my new shopping site.

oh, and the old shopping cart isn't make that much. So I won't mind zero sales for a little while if it works out in the end.

thanks so much,
jeff

[MarkB]

You could also create a simple PHP script that, when a visitor hits one of the old pages, is automatically redirected to the new page for that product/category. Then after time, block that script from bots, and Google should then (I think?) drop it from its listings.

I am, of course, merely a guessing fool ;)

[intelliot]

I think you should do a 301 ("permanent") redirect from the old URLs. Most search engines, including Google, will recognize this as a permanent move and remove the old URLs from the index.

[tomek]

I would keep the old script running but only link to the new one.

[devvy]

Hi everyone,

thanks for the tips and suggestions.

With the 301 redirect, this sounds like a very good approach and i didn't know Google would replace the old URL with the new - I guess that's why it's called permanent :-)
But I wouldn't know how to go about redirecting each and every product page since it's all dynamic.

Tomek, that's a nice and simple solution. But do you know if Google will eventually dump the old URLS from its index if it can't find a link on my site to get to it. The only snag with this approach is that I have lots of links from outside sites linking in to my product pages. None of them valuable, but Google could follow those links too.

thanks again,
jeff

[tomek]

Tomek, that's a nice and simple solution. But do you know if Google will eventually dump the old URLS from its index if it can't find a link on my site to get to it.

Yes it will eventually - otherwise google would have all pages it ever indexed in its index.



The only snag with this approach is that I have lots of links from outside sites linking in to my product pages. None of them valuable, but Google could follow those links too.


you could check the referer and if it doesn't contain "google" do a 301 - this way no new pages will be indexed by google but you can still profit from your google traffic...

[intelliot]

If you can use mod_rewrite in .htaccess to match all of your old URLs, you can use [R=301] to configure a 301 redirect from there.