osCommerce SEO friendly URLs

[slamb0513]

A potential client contacted my company about taking over an osCommerce site and possibly doing some SEO work on it. The site has been around for a while and has fairly good rankings in the search engines. They currently get 30K+ visitors from organic search a month.

They are not utilizing the oscommerce contribution for SEO friendly URLs. All their URLs look something like product_info.php?products_id=6560-200.

My fear is that switching on the SEO friendly URLs will ruin their current established rankings in the search engines.

Has anyone had experience with turning on SEO friendly URLs with an already established site that does not have them? What precautions should I take? What are the risks?

[Vithe]

I was in a similar position to you a few months ago, and decided to take the plunge. It turned out all to be fine. Our positions hardly suffered at all and, together with my other SEO efforts, they were soon on the up.

Whilst this is the only transition on search-engine friendly URLs I have overseen, it has been very smooth and we have not experienced any problems with the rankings as a result.

Hope that helps.

[AVC]

This is a matter of long term goals.

Will it make the site easy to use for customers to use SEO (and human) friendly URL's ?

I think Google will adjust either way, but changing URL's without proper forwarding is a major problem, I think that is where most fail when making the change over, giving users a dead end when they come in from links or bookmarks is stupid and has it's costs.

[racerx]

We manage quite a few OSCommerce sites for our clients and have implemented not only Friendly URLs but Ultimate URLs (much better mod). While there's typically a dip in traffic it usually doesn't take long if your site has decent PR already (I.e. Google stops by every few days) for it to not only recover but improve. The variables must go!

AVC is correct with regards to 301s. Make sure you handle that. Note: A really nice thing about Ultimate URL package is that anytime you rename a product,

A: it changes the URL to reflect the product name (key phrase) in the URL with the .html extension
B: it handles the 301 via php for you automatically.

Best of luck with it!

[crossland]

We had a client that still had the oscommerce folder in their URLs.
Initially, things went down after it was removed from the file structure.
To boost things back up, we introduced a redirect and then implemented the Sitemap mods.
We were soon ranking a lot higher.
We had a short term loss, but gained in the longer term.

Tim

WebSphere MQ

[Akashic]

We implemented the search engine friendly url mod for our oscommerce store and suffered no ill effects with the search engines.

[zhexiang]

i implement Ultimate SEO URL contribution and it works fine for me.. no problem..