Traffic Dropped by 60% - why?

Site recently recoded but traffic getting worse.

[tomthumb2000]

In october, the site was getting 8,500 page views a day, according to google. We recoded from shtml to a textpattern cms in december and traffic dropped by 40%.

Now we finally finished the redesign and implemented that and traffic feel again instantly and is now at 3000 page views a day. The site is just over 2 years old, PR5 and i'm feeling suicidal.

Just after the recode our PR feel to 3 and then came back to 5 a fortnight ago. I understand that changing file names is often bad news but i can;t understand why it got worse after we changed the design...

[jatar_k]

I am guessing you changed your pagenames each time

this is to be expected when you change the pagenames, you have to get respidered. You need to have permanent redirects in place for pages that used to exist and now have a different name

then you wait

this is why you should never change pagenames if you can help it

[mack]

You can confirm the above suggestion by checking your stats. You will almost certainly see an increase in error code 404 (page not found) that is proportional to your drop in page views.

If you still know your old page locations it may be a good idea to place some redirects. I woulden't suggest doing this on actual pages but server wide using mod_rewrite. The apache forum would be the best place to look for information on redirecting to your new locations. That is assuming you're using apache.

Mack.

[tomthumb2000]

Thanks for the replies.

We do have mod rewrite in place and my tech guy tried to make the most of previous file name change discussions here on webmasterworld into account.

I'm now also totally confused about our stats. I know they vary from package to package, but whilst google reads us at 500 visits a day, aw stats and webaliser put us at 4000, although half of those may be just hotlinks to our images.

I know the answers are all in the logs but i'm not sure how to check those...