Any Yahoo "Legacy" Store Tutorials still around?

[greeneagle]

A potential SEO client and I need help finding info on YAHOO "legacy" stores. Client does not want to update 800 product pages to new technology because of prohibitive costs at this time. Any suggestions?

Thanks
Ken

[ReliableTechniques]

There are a couple different ways to handle the legacy and Merchant Solutions migration. If you post some specifics on the problem, I would be more than willing to offer some suggestions or a possible plan of attack.

Michael

[johntang]

I have climbed out of a lot of the pitfalls. I transitioned from legacy to merchant solutions starting in jan'04 and am still trying to recover.

[greeneagle]

ReliableTechniques and johntang,

This potential client is thoroughily convinced that with 800 product pages and 1000 pages total that she is not willing to try a new technology "merchant solutions" as opposed to "Yahoo Stores". She has heard nothing but bad reviews from every source she has and just can't risk a change in the middle of her summer "Christmas" season.

She is sniffing around because she's know that something is amiss, "hasn't been properly SEO'd even by SEO company" - We are talking GROSS errors here; no title tags, same keywords for every page - This is some obsene S___ here!

Can't drag her into the fast lane yet. Sure hate to see someone get hosed like that by supposed professionals after spending 18 years of her life developing that company (even before the Internet-OHHH!). Oh, and every product she has is quality and not even drop-shipped, Ohhhh this one hurts.

She may work with us to take change mid-summer, before Christmas season, I want to make sure that we have a handful of YAHOO Store professionals that we can select from who want to take this on if it comes, that don't mind working with us (Mountain Eagle Marketing) for SEO and the Owner meddling where she needs to be, including contributions to ad- or copy-writing, many pages have no HTML except product description captions -- Her products MUST STAND ALONE! in the SERPS!

Maybe we/she can pre-screen if she dicides to make what is probably a necessary change to a new developer and SEO.

Ken

[ReliableTechniques]

There is a pretty quick fix for this situation without having to go to Merchant Solutions (MS) store. Yahoo has improved MS quite a bit since its launch, but I too would probably wait until the busy season is over prior to migrating to MS.

Anyway, with regards to the quick fix, we would need her to download her items (couple different ways to do this... template modification or there are a couple programs out there that will do it.)

We would then open this downloaded file in excel. Add three or so columns to the excel spreadsheet (Keywords, Description, and Page-Title). Put in the appropriate content for each item row. And then re-upload the items. All of these changes would have no impact on her store until we re-published the site.

Again, this is pretty easy to do. Excluding the population of the columns in the spreadsheet, total time to implement would probably be less than 4 hours or so.

If you want to get into some more details, drop me an email.

Michael