301 redirect to change url has led to very low traffic - help!

[Radiolabs]

I had a webmaster, who performed a 301 redirect, to only get rid of one word in our website.

Intead of products/widgets/product.php, he removed the "products" and redirected the website traffic.
He did not change the sitemap yet and it is only redirecting to the new URL. ie: widgets/product.php.

We were #1 rated in google for 6 - 7 years now and this one changed knocked us completely off of the map.

This change was made mid last week, just showed up yesterday adn teh site traffic is now VERY low.

Does anyone know if I can go in and undo this 301 redirect, and just put the site back to the way I originally designed it? Why he did this is not known... maybe to clean up the URL structure. If it's not broke, why fix it.

[tedster]

A move like that can be easy to do, but it should never be done casually. There are so many factors involved, including but not limited to search traffic.

So the question, can you undo it easily? Depends on whether the roots go deep into your CMS or not. You certainly need to make sure all your internal links work directly rather than going through a redirect.

You do have another alternative - wait. Google will eventually get the new URLs sorted out if everything else is technically OK, meaning that internal links are good, no serious canonical problems exist, etc. However, it can still take a couple months to recover.

What you don't want to do is take another hasty action that tangles things up even further - and give yourself an even longer wait. Be more like a carpenter - measure two or three times, from every angle you can come up with. Then cut once and only once.

[Radiolabs]

Thanks tedster for the response.
I am in the middle of the worst 301 Horror story ever.
No, it is now absolutely devastating. The 301 redirect was globally on all of our top products. The product names we made up, now, no longer even show up in google. Our resellers show up, but appears that the actual product name is banned... perhaps worse. We lost approximately 15k top search terms.
My employees are dealing with it, but we have suffered a 60% drop in traffic. He did not even come close to redirecting in the appropriate manner.
I put a reverse 301 redirect link in.. but here's the scenario....
The link that was changed was global.
/products/widget/widget.php ---> permanent redirect ---> /widget/widget.php
I would have personally performed an individual product on a trial basis, only using 3 or 4 test items... but he never changed the site map, or any of the internal links to our site. So, they all still pointed to /products/widget/... not /widget/ only.

What I am going to do is put in a reverse redirect 301, using the same method for 2 weeks, then, completely remove the /widgets/ directory completely, so search bots go to the site and find a 404, with a redirect to the original page... it still has PR3 +, so it did not get rid of the original page rank and did not cache out the page. I just feel like crying. I worked for 7 years, hard hours to get the ranking we have on over 300 web pages... now it's all gone.

It's like paying someone to basically ruin all the hard work you have done, everything that keeps your employees working and your manufacturing employees producing product and ... you get the point. I think this one small error could make a few employees lose their jobs if the problem does not resolve itself.

Please, anyone placing 301 redirects, think very hard before you put them in effect. Keep your employees out of your server functions and deny access to your .htaccess file. Economy is bad enough, then to have this happen could spell disaster. Luckily we've been around long enough that our resellers may save us.

I am thinking about just calling it quits, selling out and retiring at this point. I'm 40... I can just go get on my boat and go cruise the west coast and fish I guess.

[jdMorgan]

Two bits of advice:

First, don't ignore the advice that's been given to you in this thread... It is correct, and you could have gladly paid a lot for it, as have many well-known businesses.

And following on to that, keep in mind the saying, "When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging."

The absolute most that I would recommend doing to your site it this specific case is to remove the rogue 301 redirect. Then leave your site alone -- to include not changing anything else at all until your rankings recover. There are other more productive and less dangerous things you can do.

The error here was not in the implementation of the 301 redirect, although I agree that it seems that it was unnecessary. The error was in *not* updating all internal links first, before implementing the redirect. The site map should have been updated as well, but waiting a while to do that would not have been such a severe problem.

So again, your best bet here would be to remove the redirect, and then look at other marketing channels to fill the revenue gap until your site recovers. Consider opening an Adwords or other PPC campaign(s) to drive traffic to your site during the recovery period.

Other channels, such as print, radio, and TV ads may be feasible as well (I don't know your business or its scale). Also look into social media -- Many businesses are now using Twitter, Facebook, and other such methods to drive visitors to their sites.

If you will be unable to "sit and watch" with a cool business eye while the recovery process slowly unfolds, then the fishing trip might actually be a good idea; It *will* take time for Google to sort out the very-mixed message you've sent them, and if you keep changing the message you're sending them, then the recovery time will simply increase; With continuous and repeated surgery, the patient will never recover.

For the future, adopt a "requirements-based" approach to updating your Web site and changing your server configuration, to include proposals, justification, and formal review. Make sure that there is a need, that the technical effects are known in advance, and that the technical implementation is correct to achieve the desired goal. Also, the expansion into alternate marketing channels like PPC, print ads, social media, etc. should be permanent; One lesson we've learned here --starting with AltaVista's "Black Monday" on October 25th of 1999 and repeatedly reinforced by the many upheavals caused by Google algorithm and filter updates since then, is that the search engines can be fickle, and that relying solely on organic search results to bring in business is not the best approach.

Best,
Jim

[netmeg]

That's very good advice from jdMorgan; I hope you take it.

I made a mistake this summer with a 301 redirect having to do with a mobile page, during the middle of my peak traffic season. When I realized what I'd done I was horrified (and I took a hit on advertising) but I just undid what I'd done and waited, and it all came back in a matter of hours. Your mileage may vary (as it sounds more complicated) But I think Google has gotten pretty good at figuring such things out.

[Radiolabs]

Thank you Jim. We are just putting it back to how it was, pre-Y2K on our site. That is excellent advice and I thank you very much.
I am an electronic engineer, so I am only so good at web related issues.
However, I spent so many hundreds of hours, initially building the site to have such high SERPs, I am just hoping it was not a mortal wound. Thanks again, I really do appreciate it and taking both of your advices this morning and just removing any 301, removing any trace of this problem happening and we will just cross our fingers it recovers.
Additionally, we have already implimented a non-results based business approach, with informational video, some radio advertising. A lot of our market is global, so some of that will not work.
Thanks again for the advice. You guys are great.
Chris