changing hosts and site

[bubbles]

Hi

I wonder if anyone can advise please.

A friend of mine has just bought a site which has been live for about 18 months. The last owner hasn't done much with it for about the last 6 months because of other commitments and my friend would like me to take over the work that needs doing to build it back up again.

The site is a hosted shopping cart which is built entirely online. When looking at it I feel it is very limited in what you can do with it, e.g. you can't add lots of extra pages for articles etc which I think she needs to help promote her health products. You also have very little control over the Title tags and design etc. It looks very 'shopping cartish' to me without any real 'substance'

This way also works out very expensive in the long run as you have to pay quite a large monthly fee.

I have discussed with her that we could build it again using ecommercetemplates shopping cart which, in my opinion, is a great cart, inexpensive and very flexible. We would have much more control and it would be a lot cheaper in the long run.

This is the part I don't understand however, and that is, how much weight would she lose in the search engines that she would have built up to some degree already? Some of her products do seem to be seen within the first page or 2 of Google (typing in fairly specific terms)

Her domain name would stay the same and I could try to reproduce the current pages when it comes to page titles and text etc but of course nothing will be exactly the same.

I don't want to advise her to do the wrong thing but I am swayed to change because of the long term saving etc but I really don't understand when it comes to this part. :o

If anyone has any comments or suggestions as the best way to change over I would be really grateful.

Thanks in advance

Denise

[bubbles]

Hi, me again.

I thought I'd try again to see if anyone has any suggestions as I keep getting conflicting opinions and am a bit confused. Hope that's ok - I'm not pestering or anything ;)

I figure if nobody on here knows then I'm in trouble!

Thanks a lot

Denise

[David Wallace]

I'd say do what is best for your web site visitors as well as what is best for site owner. If current cart is limited and a better one could be put in place that will not only give you more flexibility and hopefully increase sales, then do it without regard to losing a few positions or so. You can always gain them back by ensuring new cart has crawlable pages, good content and is overly optimized well. If you are concerned about losing a few choice spots for certain URLs in the SERPs, simply 301 redirect old URLS to new ones.

Bottom line is to never let some good positions in the search engines hold you hostage to doing what is best for your paying customers.

[bubbles]

Thanks david

I'll have to lokk up 301 redirects now! :)

Denise