URL renaming with 301 redirects killed site wide page rank

help please!

[jamesklee]

I maintain a travel content site.

Since we had over 1000 articles, and it was getting hard to maintain, we recently moved everything into a CMS, which required renaming the URLs from, for example:

www.example.com/brazil/guide_brazil.shtml

to

http://www.example.com/guide/216/brazil-travel-guide-online

I added a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file as follows:
Redirect permanent /brazil/guide_brazil.shtml http://www.example.com/guide/216/brazil-travel-guide-online

... this was implemented 1 week ago, and now our google PR had dropped from 5 to 3!

I feel like 2 years of work building PR is up in smoke... What can I do? Should I re-establish the old files & URLs?

It's too bad, we were finally making enough from affiliates & adsense revenue to grow the site and hire outside help and now I feel it's mostly gone up in smoke... god.

[edited by: engine at 11:48 am (utc) on Jan. 10, 2007]
[edit reason] examplified, See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[g1smd]

Yes. Supply the bot with "HTTP/1.1 : 404 Not Found".

Supply the human with "The page you wanted cannot be found. Try this section of the site, or this page, or the root index page, for other alteratives...", where section, page, and root are all clickable links to those other parts of the site.

[activeco]

It didn't really effect the performance of the page.

That's exactly right. The real PR does not suffer, just the toolbar's green pixels.

The strange thing is that OP reported significant drop in traffic too.