Changed from Absolute links to Relative - Lost Traffic

Google traffic dropped after changing link structure

[Kelcor]

Established site for about 6 years. We changed from Absolute links to relative links on our main navigation to lower to code size. from http://www.example.com/page.aspx to page.aspx

This change made the pages about 20% smaller. Everything to the user looks and acts the same. I feel the page load time is slightly better.

After reading many posts on this subject, I assumed this change will not make any difference. However we noticed a huge drop in traffic.

Could this be a "Sandbox" we are seeing, or did I make a mistake by changing this?

[edited by: tedster at 3:23 am (utc) on Sep. 13, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

Well, it "could be" a temporary sandboxing or filtering of your pages because of sitewide changes -- but you really should find out exactly what's going on. Can you access your server logs from before and after the change? It's a situation that calls for some analysis, I'd say, and not just generalized discussion.

Questions I'd ask if I were responsible for the site include: What keywords stopped delivering traffic? Where did they rank on Google during their high traffic period? Where now? Have I made any other changes to the site during this period? Are there other keywords that still are delivering at their previous level? And so on.

We can't discuss information that's this specific in the forums, but perhaps your analysis will uncover some more general principles that we can discuss.

[g1smd]

Absolute links will have forced the domain.

Relative links allow both www and non-www to be accessed if you do not have a non-www to www 301 redirect installed.

You might find that both are now being indexed; and that will be a problem.

[Kelcor]

I noticed something different now, Possibly Related to the original post, maybe the actual reason.

When I login to google webmaster tools. There is a list of "Not Found" (404) pages that have never been there.

Example:

It is showing: (Removes the?)
wireless-widget.aspxCategoryID=24

It should be:
wireless-widget.aspx?CategoryID=24

If you search <for one particular 2-word phrase> we have been on the 1st page for a couple years. Even through the recent months of flux, we would only move between the 3rd, and 5th spots. The actual page is still in the index, just not ranked.

This is the case for 5 of our top category pages (Just luck I guess). Nothing else has changed in our rankings.

[edited by: tedster at 3:00 pm (utc) on Sep. 13, 2006]

[piatkow]

A curiosity about relative links.

I have a page mysite.com/subfolder/index.html
which referenced ../page1.html

Webmaster Tools showed this a crawl error with a 404 for mysite.com/subfolder/page1.html rather retrieving mysite.com/page1.html

No typos in the code, I had tested it on my PC and on the web from a different PC.

[piatkow]

Typo - should read "rather THAN retrieving"