Worried about losing ranking if I switch cart (to opencart)

We have only five products on our site; one of them accounting for 80% of turnover. For that keyword we are number one on google, which makes the matter of indexing by google (if indexing is the right word) quite important to us.

My site needs a lick of paint and I've been wanting to change to opencart for a while (I was kind of holding off for 1.5 but would probably go with the stable 1.4.9), but what are the ranking implications?

This may be a complete unknowable; it may be that it depends on abc...xyz, or the answer may be straightforward... ?

Thanks

You can add redirect 301 (permanently moved) entries in .htaccess from high ranking pages to their new equivalents.

redirect 301 oldpath newpath

If there is a sensible way of mapping old pages, you could add a rewrite rule with a regular expression.

I've moved from osCommerce to Opencart.

I added an: ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?route=information/information&information_id=6, to point to a custom Page not found page so if a customer would follow an old like he was welcomed with info on how the proceed from there.
The 404 is for search-engines to know that the link they followed was obsolete and needed to be removed from their spider.

In the first 10 days I've lost my Page 1 and Page 2 and other page rankings to find that I then returned to Page 1(!) with almost all my products.

I did not bother to redirect I just wanted a new ranking based on my new store, new pages and new products content and it worked.

Make sure your SEO is unique and you will see the results.

I write all the copy. I'm think off using some of my old stuff but most likely I'll update it. Our retail customers often use our copy but they don't use so much of it, so we tend to come top.

Aside: I wish we had a blog!

Definitely use 301 redirects for those high ranking pages to the new equivalent -- that way any backlinks to those pages will still benefit you.

Then just be sure that your new OpenCart pages have the same language, meta descriptions, page titles, etc. as the old page and you should maintain your ranking. If you change up that text in a way that's worse SEO, then when Google indexes the page, it could alter your ranking (just as it could if you change that text on your current page in your current cart).

Brocberry wrote:I write all the copy. I'm think off using some of my old stuff but most likely I'll update it. Our retail customers often use our copy but they don't use so much of it, so we tend to come top.

Aside: I wish we had a blog!

you can allways add door way pages!

doorway pages are a copy of your main page or somethine nice and simple with a link to your main index.htm or index.php url what ever your main url is make a link to it i have 5 doorway pages !

zantar wrote:you can allways add door way pages!

Be very careful when using doorway pages -- Google is inherently suspiscious of them: http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=66355

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.

It's possible if they aren't at all deceptive or designed to boost search engine rank that Google will just ignore them, but it's also always possible that Google could notice them (or you could be reported by competition) and they could punish you.

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They are called doorway-pages OR landing-pages.

I'm using them as well, they have original context but links to my store.
Searching on Google I'm mostly on Page 1 and/or on position 1.

I never regretted switching to OpenCart, for 98% of my products I'm ranking Page 1 now and that is much more then with my osCommerce store.