Coming from PrestaShop to Magento CE: How to handle links already in Google/Bing Index?

Question

So I want to exchange my PrestaShop installation for Magento CE.

I currently have more than 600 pages in the Google & Bing Indexes, managed by using XML sitemaps and the Google/Bing Webmaster Tools.

Using Magento will result in a different URL format (and I don't even want to keep the PrestaShop URL scheme), so all already indexed pages will have to be updated or redirected.

What is the best solution to handle this without loosing page ranks and negative side effects?

Answer 1

The simplest and best method is to avoid putting rewrite logic into Magento when it should really be done pre-PHP on the web server itself.

Using rewrite rules on your server is the perfect fit and good for tens of thousands of rewrites. You can concatenate rewrites by writing regex patterns to match multiple URLs.

This would be a manual process and require you to populate all the URLs by hand.

If you want something more automated, you could make a Magento module with its own router, then perform a single query based on the old URL, and when importing your catalogue, have an attribute for old URL, so that you can very quickly, and simply redirect traffic.

Answer 2

You can create url rewrites for each of your pages.
Just insert in the table core_url_rewrite this for each page you already have:

INSERT INTO `core_url_rewrite` SET 
    `store_id` = 1, --or something else if you have more strores--
    `category_id` = NULL,
    `product_id` = NULL,
    `id_path` = 'Generate a random unique string here',
    `request_path` = 'Your prestashop url',
    `target_path` = 'Your magento url',
    `is_system` = 0,
    `options` = 'RP', -- it means it will do a 301 redirect --
    `description` = NULL;