SEO Question

[ukgeezer]

We had a very successful site written in html that had approximately 250 items and attracted more than 18000 visitors/month.
In April we launched a replacement ecommerce site in php with 2000 products that barely reaches 5000 visitors/month. I have checked Google and found that five months after launch only about 1305 pages have been indexed by Google.
I have added an RSS feed that lists the sitemap as well as submitting the sitemap.xml feed to Google. Is there anything I should be doing to get the rest of the site indexed or do I have to rely on Google eventually indexing the new pages?
Would it help if I continually modified those pages that have yet to be indexed so that the generated site map indicates recent changes?

[morestar]

We had a very successful site written in html that had approximately 250 items and attracted more than 18000 visitors/month.
In April we launched a replacement ecommerce site in php with 2000 products that barely reaches 5000 visitors/month. I have checked Google and found that five months after launch only about 1305 pages have been indexed by Google.
I have added an RSS feed that lists the sitemap as well as submitting the sitemap.xml feed to Google. Is there anything I should be doing to get the rest of the site indexed or do I have to rely on Google eventually indexing the new pages?
Would it help if I continually modified those pages that have yet to be indexed so that the generated site map indicates recent changes?

a long time ago i took an html site that was selling mapel syrup and turned in into a working ecommerce site using OSCommerce as the template.

their rankings and traffic drop down substantially, now looking back for plenty of reasons.

Curious but have you thought about going back to the original template?

[innominds]

Other than submitting a sitemap, I don't find any other solution to your problem.

[ukgeezer]

Morestar>>

The original site built traffic over several years and it maybe that I am just being impatient. We have considered going back to the html version and this may be the way forward. We are also using the OSCommerce platform. I would be interested to know your "plenty of reasons"

[morestar]

ya, every install of OSCommerce that I've re-done a website with, every one of them have lost their rankings...

if I were getting that many hits with the html version and lost that many hits with OScommerce I would definitely go back to the HTML version...

you're selling a product right?

are you finding OSCommerce is really not doing anything special for you?

[danlefree]

I'm assuming you've taken pains to implement the product and category names in URL's with osCommerce - have you also set up 301 redirects from the old content to the present content?

Assuming that your product pages map to the same/very similar content from the old .html's, you might throw together a 301 redirect mapping script (like that one) to get Google to pick up on the relationship between the old content and the new content.

[morestar]

I'm assuming you've taken pains to implement the product and category names in URL's with osCommerce - have you also set up 301 redirects from the old content to the present content?

Assuming that your product pages map to the same/very similar content from the old .html's, you might throw together a 301 redirect mapping script (like that one) to get Google to pick up on the relationship between the old content and the new content.

ya he can do all that but in the end it will take months more to get the rankings and traffic he was getting.

if i owned his business i would want my rankings back up today. the only question is will his rankings go back to normal if he uses the same template as in the past.

[Ace]

Try keeping old URL's or Links or Pages live means Use osCommerce as an extension of previous website

[scgalvin]

Yah, I think not having those 301 redirect would be a big problem. I have old sites with urls address that I would like to update along with a new CMS, but I'm scared to death that I would lose ground in the search engines. Specially when I hear stories like these.

[ukgeezer]

you're selling a product right?

are you finding OSCommerce is really not doing anything special for you?

Yes we are selling products and we selected OSCommerce on recommendation. The developer we selected has visually done a good job with the data that was provided. I have subsequently had to work on the product descriptions to add content to improve Google rankings. We have another site that uses ZenCart as the platform and if I were asked to judge them, I would say the OSCommerce site is more user friendly, both from a User and Customer point of view.