I am a novice at SEO and 301s, 404s, and whatnot. I'm Ok at designing a site and messing with a bit of code but never spent enough time on the search stuff.
Here's my situation and I'd be grateful for any and all advice.
I have a Miva Merchant webstore running at www.mydomain.com. We've had it running for about 8 years now. All our products have the SEO friendly URL of
mydomain.com/page/C1/PROD/product_code. product_code is the actual SKU of the individual item.
We are finishing the development of a CS 2.2.1 store to take over in a couple of weeks. The URL of the products on this store is: mydomain.com/product_name.html.
Over the years we have developed a pretty strong ranking on Google for our products (the long hard way). Is there any way to try and save those rankings by redirecting those old URLs to the new URL for the product. From my limited knowledge of this science, I don't think so but I thought I would ask the experts out there. I would hate to start all over with Google only because I was afraid to ask a dumb question.
Thanks in advance for any and all feedback.
I am doing the same thing with one of my sites. I have recently used Alt Team http://www.alt-team.com/ to do some custom work on my shop and they have been excellent. I have spoken to them about moving my shop and 301's and they gave me a reasonable price.
You may want to read this post:
Recommend Cart / Store Developer Alt-Team - Installation & Upgrade - CS-Cart Community Forums