About a week away from switching carts

[tmilone103]

I am about a week away from switching carts and I am now working on my listings of all 301's I need to upload. I have been with Volusion for 6 years now and I managed over time to get around 6000 inbound links to my site. Around 5000 of these links are aimed to product URL's which will no longer exist. I am making 301's to match all these up so the links don't go 404.

I am getting scared to switch the DNS because I am worried about loosing my top search listings I managed to get with 6 years of hard work.

Will I take a big hit on the search engines when these 5000+ inbound links all go to 301's? I know they will re-index the new pages but do I loose the power of all these inbound links since they no longer point to current pages?

Looking for any input from people who have switched? Should I be scared to complete the move?

[piaf]

tmilone103, we made the official switch from Volusion to 3dCart in November, right before Thanksgiving. We had over 1000 301 redirects for our store, and we paid 3dCart to import them as a batch into our new store.

It took about 24 hours for our DNS switch to fully propagate throughout the internet, and as soon as it was done, we started seeing the Google listings change from our old URL's to our new URL's within a couple of days. Believe me, Google doesn't waste ANY time following those redirects and getting everything switched over to the new URL's.

We did not lose any rankings in Google (usually spots 1-3 for our keywords) when we switched over. One of the other users in here, rburton34, who is another Volusion user, was also carefully watching our rankings to see how they did before deciding on whether or not to move his store here too. So he can confirm that our rankings maintained their levels in Google after the switch with the 301's in place.

My advice would be to do the DNS switch at the time of day when your store traffic is the lowest (we actually CLOSED our Volusion store with a closure notice for 2 days during the switchover so either customers got the "closed store for upgrades" notice or they got the new store site if the DNS had made it through to their ISP), and be very, very sure that your 301's are accurate before making the switch.

[tmilone103]

That's good to hear that the move was successful for you. Did you have a lot of backlinks to your site? That is what I am most concerned with? Have your sales stabilized after the switch? I have a lot of issues with Volusion and my site loading slow which is my primary reason for the move. Tired of getting the app pool cleared and the site running better for a few days and then it getting slow again and customers leaving. Not to mention all the downtime we have had in the past 2 months.

[piaf]

According to Google, we've got around 7000 links to our site, however, the majority of them link to our home page. Either way, our switch was painless. As far as sales go, we switched right before the holiday rush, so it's sort of hard to tell whether things improved or not. But this month is looking pretty good. :)