Good news for Yahoo! Store merchants: Following an official Yahoo! store update, there is now no need to pay a custom development agency to handle your Yahoo! Store 301 redirects.
As recently as August of 2011, Yahoo! Store merchants were coming to us (FastPivot.com) to request custom Yahoo! Store 301 redirects, as there was at that time no easy and effective way to do them on the Yahoo! Store platform.
In this August, 2011 blog, we touched on the elaborate process we had to go through in order to help Yahoo! Store merchants employ new urls for their business, without losing traffic: 301 Redirect Softens SEO Landing During Yahoo! Store Transition.
The way we have worked with non-Yahoo! Store merchants on an SEO transition solution has been to get into their account to create redirects once the Yahoo! Store has been built. We create redirects for the current url to the new store for a two-three month period so that spiders and the calling notice the new store. Over time the new pages begin getting indexed and the old store pages are replaced in the search. When the 301 redirect occurs, the other store would stay live but wouldn’t be open. Customers who have their bookmarks already set would be redirected to the new store, versus having customers with the previous store information in their cache get a “Page Not Found” notice.
However, with Yahoo!’s update, all that is now irrelevant. For merchants keeping the same data structure – just changing the domain name, Yahoo! can handle these 301 redirects automatically. There’s a simple setting under “domain names” where you can choose which domain name to use primarily. The “page-level” redirects option is what the aforementioned blog speaks about, and that is also a new feature by Yahoo, so our custom version is no longer needed. In our opinion, this is the best new feature from Yahoo! this year. The redirect tool works for merchants that are not on the Yahoo! Store platform, but plan to open a Yahoo! Store. That is a primary use for the tool.
Merchants should be aware that 301 redirects, where a domain name totally changes, a shift will occur in SEO no matter what, but the use of 301 redirects may soften the blow.
For Yahoo! Store merchants who want to understand what is currently happening with their store’s SEO and how to improve it, consider a FastPivot conducted Yahoo! Store SEO Analysis, which includes reporting on: Potential Domain Issues, Search Engine Site Cache, Google Page Rank, Onsite Content, META content, HTML and site code, Link Popularity Checkup, and SEO Roadblocks.
