I recently came across a great blog post titled “Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO“. It’s a great read for any ecommerce store owner that is interested in optimizing their store in terms of search engine rankings. The author, Everett Sizemore, brings up a number of good points and ideas when it comes to SEO for an ecommerce website.

I’d like to focus on one of the points in the post; specifically, redirecting URLs with a 301 permanent redirect when a product is deleted or a filename altered. Although the examples below will entail ShopSite specific scenarios, the advice applies to almost any ecommerce software package.

Change is Inevitable

Any store owner knows that product lines change, product names mutate, and new products replace old ones. All of this is of course a good thing. What many store owners fail to realize is search engines do not like abrupt changes. Google and company like to be gently told what to do when something is not as they expect.

For ShopSite merchants, a common scenario is initially not setting a unique filename for a product’s More Information page. When omitted, ShopSite will generate a filename of the format:
product####.html
(where “####” is an internal record number)

Later on, many merchants decide they want to use a more descriptive URL/filename, so they edit the product and set the filename to something like:
fire-red-ipod.html

This is a good thing, right? It can be, but often times there are unintended consequences, especially when the old filename is not deleted:

1. The old URL continues to be indexed
   Search engines will happily keep indexing this old, outdated page, and would be shoppers will end up here as well.
2. Duplicate content
   Now your store has two pages with the exact same content. Get enough duplicate content, and your site may see a small penalty in terms of ranking. Worse, now the search engines have to decide which page to index, and it may be the old outdated one they decide to use.

Delete and Redirect

When you do delete a product or change its URL, make sure the old file is deleted. You can do this via FTP, or, in ShopSite, by saying “yes” to the option to also delete the file when deleting a product. In the case of changing the filename, a quick trick in ShopSite to delete the old moreinfo page is to create a test page and give it the same file name as the old product more information filename. Then delete this page in ShopSite saying “yes” to deleting the file as well.

Most importantly, make sure you set up a 301 permanent redirect. This accomplishes two tasks:

1. Tells the search engines what to do
   A 301 redirect is an instruction to the search engines that the old URL they are trying to index has moved to a new location. This means the search engines will keep this page’s ranking the same, and update their database to display the new URL. The alternative is they delete the old page ranking and your new page will have to start all over again.
2. Redirect potential customers correctly
   Shoppers who click on old links from other sites or search engine results will be taken to the new page seamlessly. Without a 301, they will either get the dreaded “404 not found” page or go to an old outdated page that has incorrect information.

A Few Simple Examples

Assuming your hosting platform uses the Apache web browser (almost any Unix/Linux server will fall in this category), you would put your 301 redirects in a file named .htaccess (yes, there is a dot before the word) in your main web directory (i.e. www, public_html, etc…)

The format is as follows (each redirect should be all on one line):
RedirectPermanent /old_filename.html http://xyz.com/new_filename.html

A few things to note:

1. The first part is the old URL, starting with a slash. Do not put a full URL here, only the part after your domain name.
2. The second part is the FULL URL to the new location. It must start with http:// to be valid
3. The format above assumes there are no spaces in the URL.

If you do have space in the old URL/filename, enclose it in double quotes like this:
RedirectPermanent “/subdir/old file.html” http://xyz.com/new.html

Dynamic URL redirection

If the old URL you are trying to redirect is dynamic like:
http://xyz.com/cat.php?id=34

then you will need to use a mod_rewrite rule instead of a simple redirect. Here is an example:
<IFModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=34
RewriteRule cat.php http://xyz.com/prod34.html? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

* BE VERY CAREFUL when editing a .htaccess file. One minor typo can cause your entire site to break.

The Moral of the Story is:

• Any time you make a change to a product’s URL or delete a product, set up a 301 redirect to direct search engines and potential customers to the appropriate location.