what is the best practice for urls after upgrading

[volteq]

we recently upgraded to Cube Cart 6, and use the tools that came with it to re-built the SEO friendly urls, which are different from the ones we had before. By doing so, we have created some issues and chaos, as customers coming in via google search will face a broken link, which is pretty nasty. I wonder what is the best practice on how to deal with the chaos between old and new urls. come to think about it, by using the new urls, we may also lose a lot of back-links. 

Would really appreciate some good advices.

Thanks in advance.

[Lastwolf]

The inbuilt tools do the bulk of the work for you.

Afaik, best practice is to truncate as much as possible and remove any special characters, the inbuilt tool will do the latter you'd need to do the rest yourself.

If you take the title of your product;

Quote

A ReaLly big hat !! that is red

  Using the tool that'd be

Quote

/a-really-big-hat-that-is-red

But you'd probably want to remove as much as possible extra information without reducing the actual information, just "hat" would be the purest seo but loses too much description so;

Quote

/big-red-hat

Would the "best" seo result, least as far as I understand it.

 

You need to rebuild your google search asap, submitting your site map and google shopping links to the new ones should fix that with a day or two, google crawls alot.

Your internal links should dynamically update, as far as cubecart is concerned there is a lookup table against your item id and seo link, unless you've hard coded the links for some reason.

Edited May 18, 2023 by Lastwolf

[bsmither]

In admin, near the bottom of the left-pane navigation, click 'Redirects'.

Here, you will be able to add obsolete URLs to point to the new URL. CubeCart will tell the browser there is a 301 Redirect.

For example, "wormhole-generator.html" redirects to "wormhole-generator" (knowing that, now, CubeCart manages the inclusion of ".html" internally).

Hopefully, you have a list (from a database backup?) from the table CubeCart_seo_urls of the obsolete URLs.

 

[volteq]

Thanks so much for your advice!

3 hours ago, Lastwolf said:

Your internal links should dynamically update, as far as cubecart is concerned there is a lookup table against your item id and seo link, unless you've hard coded the links for some reason.

can you please explain in more details? we have hard coded the links unknowingly ...