Redesign problem

drop in visitors

[planet]

I did a redesign on a site that had a good number of visitors but since the changes there was a huge drop in visitors.

I have since learnt that my big mistake was "Old target links cannot be left to die!" There are no pages that link to these now non existent pages but search engines were still coming up with them and they went to default 404 pages OR (with apache) were going to pages similar in name to the pages being called but would then but stuck.

I have made a custom 404 page and have made some changes to my files for Apache. Is this my solution? Or is there something else I missed? I am a new webmaster and this site is for family (thankfully) The hits have dropped from 600 to 150-200 (but the visits have increased) The number of pages went from 10 to 35, does this have anything to do with it?

Thx, Planet

[tolachi]

You should 301 redirect your old pages to your corresponding new pages using mod_rewrite in apache. People won't even really notice the difference and will get pretty seamlessly redirected to your new pages. Google should update itself to the new pages based on the redirects.

Do a search, this has been discussed extensively.