Changing links from files to directories

[riospace]

I changed all of my internal links that went to index files to go to the directory.

My traffic has instantly droped about 25% since the link change 3 days ago.

I do not understand why since nothing has really changed or been redirected.

What is going on?

[webboy1]

I had something confirmed the other day that I had thought for a long time, but was never 100%. It sounds like this could be the cause of your drop in traffic.

Search engines will class the following as different pages:

yourdomain.com/folder/index.htm
yourdomain.com/folder/

So, in your case, if you have jumped from the first to the second, effectively what you've done is broken all links to the first (which were doing well in SE's) and added new links (which haven't really been crawled properly yet.

It could be that your new versions of links will eventually rank just as highly, but I would suggest the above may be what has caused the drop.

Have a read at Cavemans comments in this post (which I was also a part of): [webmasterworld.com...]

Hope this helps

[webboy1]

I had something confirmed the other day that I had thought for a long time, but was never 100%. It sounds like this could be the cause of your drop in traffic.

Search engines will class the following as different pages:

yourdomain.com/folder/index.htm
yourdomain.com/folder/

So, in your case, if you have jumped from the first to the second, effectively what you've done is broken all links to the first (which were doing well in SE's) and added new links (which haven't really been crawled properly yet.

It could be that your new versions of links will eventually rank just as highly, but I would suggest the above may be what has caused the drop.

Have a read at Cavemans comments in this post (which I was also a part of): [webmasterworld.com...]

Hope this helps