SEO questions: Page rank affected?

[icecold]

I was wondering if anyone has done a complete transition between OSCMax1.7 to OSCMaxRC3 and saw any search engine ranking change as a result of the new SEO, for instance if i had a product in the older version pointing to a product page that used to have a high ranking now with the new system .html generated pages even if that is significantly an improvement an makes crawling easier for the search engine spiders, as the old page name which is already listed in a higher position, no longer exists, then the search engines will not list that page as high as it was. Does anyone experienced significant page rank changes?

[jbanda]

No, I'm waiting for v2 Gold and some sort of transition plan before I try updating my two very successful 1.7 stores. I have one new store going live next Monday and another going live Nov. 1 that are v2 RC3, and the implementations are going very well.

As for the page rank dropping with the upgrade, you'll have that problem with just about any major site change/upgrade - it has nothing to do with the SEO friendly URLs that are part of oscMax. It's the nature of the beast - the search engine will lose the already well-indexed pages and have to crawl the new ones, and it will take time for the new pages/site to become well-indexed again.

Just for the record, I had a standard osCommerce site that I did NO optimization for whatsoever (it was a demo site) and the search engines had a field day with it - I had to pull the site because no matter how many disclaimers I put on the site, people would still try to buy products off of it.

[aaanativearts]

You can keep your old traffic from already indexed pages by using the .htaccess directive 301 Permanently Moved to redirect the old URL to the new url syntax. That way you don't lose the search engine listings you already have while you wait for all the new pages to be re-indexed, which can take months on a large site.