Major Traffic Loss After Bad 301 Redirect: How To Recover?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

I had a page that used to get about 150 unique views a day, but after moving from a static html page to a wordpress page about a month ago (and having a bad 301 redirect* in place for the first week) it has yet to regain that traffic. (All my other redirects seem to be receiving the same amount of traffic as before.)

I wonder what the best method of regaining that traffic might be? I am tempted to delete the redirect and just put the old page back up. However, I worry that would just confuse google (and let's admit it; google seems confused enough as it is right now).

thanks in advance for your suggestions.

<sub>*When I say a "bad" redirect, I had the wrong syntax in my php redirect header. Instead of:

<?php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.mydomain.com/blog/my-new-page/" );
?>

I left out the Location: part, so it only looked like this:

<?php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "http://www.mydomain.com/blog/my-new-page/" );
?>

When I tested in fetch as googlebot and live http headers, it said it was a correct 301 redirect. When I went to the old page in FireFox, it redirected properly, but when i went to the old page in Internet Explorer 8, it gave a 500 error.</sub>

.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:48 pm (utc) on May 6, 2012]
[edit reason] disabled auto-link so url will display [/edit]

[Planet13]

And oddly enough, traffic just started coming back to that page yesterday after I submitted this post. We will see how long it lasts.

It is strange because another page I had I completely removed for about two months (was returning a 404 status) and after putting back up last week in a different directory (same site but different URL and file extension), traffic regained to original levels as if it had never been gone.

Now if I could only figure out some way to monetize the traffic to those pages...

[aristotle]

Most likely the redirect with bad syntax confused the Google algorithm, and this caused it to "put things on hold" regarding that page. After you corrected the mistake, it could have waited a while to make sure everything was stabilized.

[g1smd]

Return "503 Unavailable", with guidance to not return for perhaps 6 or 12 hours, for that request, long enough for Google to respider it. That might cause the bot to take greater interest when visiting the next time after that when it again redirects.