moishier - 3:26 pm on Sep 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

After months of work, we modified all URL's on our site to be 301 redirects to a new URL schema. The new URL schema is more search engine friendly in that it does not have dynamic-looking parameters.

What we are seeing after waiting 2-3 weeks is that Google dropped all versions of dynamic-looking URL's in it's index, and did NOT replace them with the new version of the URL. We dropped from 120k pages in the index to 87k pages. We also are not coming up for certain keywords that we were always there for, and are seeing 50% less traffic from Google.

Other pages affected by this update, incidently, HAVE been updated in the index. For example, a page that was /article.asp was updated to /article.htm, and that shows up fine as updated in the SERPs. The pages that dropped and have not been updated are only pages like this: /article.asp?aid=1234, that were changed to /article.htm/aid/1234.

Note that Yahoo has already completely updated it's index with the new URL schema. I also tested the site with HTTP headers viewers and there are no redirecting issues. The max amount of redirects you get are 2-3, not more than there were before the update.

Help! How long is this going to last? Am I penalized? Can a site be "partially penalized"?

Any insight on what's going on?