I’m not sure how many users within SEOmoz use Miva Merchant 5 as their ecommerce platform, but we’ve recently been approached by numerous companies complaining that their 2-4 year old sites have dropped out of Google, Yahoo, and MSN completely. Upon first glance, we assumed that the drop was caused by lack of activity, on and off page SEO, and tons of other things; however, we were surprised to see that the link between all of them was they recently employed a 3rd party module developed by a Miva Partner that is used to improve URL structure.
The problem is that there are 2 Miva 5 modules out there developed by certified Miva partners that provide mod rewrite abilities and instructions on how to pull it off using a .htaccess file. In theory, this would be a great module to employ for new sites, but established sites that already ranked well and received tons of search traffic were also using this module to rewrite their URLs because the module’s description explains that it is a must and that it will improve a site’s rankability.
So, now you want me to get to my point. These module developers walk the user through the process of setting up these mod rewrites, but do not provide them with instructions on how to 301 redirect the old dynamic pages to the new static URLs. When website owners that had established sites began using this module, they were instructed to block access to the old Miva directory via a robot.txt file and rework their navigation to link to the new SEO-friendly links. This caused rankings that were achieved for these old URLs to drop off the face of the earth, and each site saw around a 50-60% drop in traffic for periods that extended past 3-4 months.
We’ve been lobbying trying to educate the Miva community that if you have an established website, do not use the search engine friendly link modules until the developers begin providing documentation on how they can properly 301 redirect the old pages to the new. Our suggestions have not been well received by the module developers to the point they start sounding skirting around a question about taking bribes, but what are you going to do?
Ted, HustAarcMedia.com
