The web site redesign About a month ago, we migrated a 7,000 product/category page site to a new platform (unfortunately from LAMP to .NET) from their old site (http://oldsite.kitchenworksinc.co...) We recategorized all the pages into nicely organized L1, L2, L3 categories with related products We tried our best to optimize all product page titles and meta descriptions and the same for the category pages URL Hell: The old site (http://oldsite.kitchenworksinc.co...) had very poor usability, poor design but the main problem was that every time the client edited a page it created a new url, so they have tons of duplicate pages. On top of that the urls were not standard format but have all sorts of url encoded characters like: http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/2345/Basics-Cookie-Cutters-(Shapes,-Gingerbread-People,-Etc.) http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/475/Roasting,-Lasagna-and-Broiler-Pans http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/475/Roasting, Lasagna and Broiler Pans http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/10... Saleen® Washable Placemats http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/105/German%20Saleen%C2%AE%20%20Washable%20Placemats http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/1581/Tea%20Infusers%20and%20Accessories http://www.kitchenworksinc.com/1581/Tea-Infusers-and-Accessories Site:kitchenworksinc.com returns 15,900 pages If you remove the ‘old pages’ from that query (the old product pages have ‘itemDetail’ in the url) you get: site:kitchenworksinc.com –itemDetail, 6,390 pages so there are probably around 8,000 urls that are ‘old pages’ but we cant be sure Scary Traffic Drop For a few weeks after the migration things weren’t bad, now the traffic is dropping like crazy. See charts below from google analytics and the webmaster account. What we have done postlaunch XML Site maps: Created xml site maps for each category and all the products – all those ~ 5,000 pages have been indexed by google according to the GW account 301 redirects: Every day we log into google webmaster and download all the 404 error pages that are old pages We define 301 redirects from the old to the new pages We currently have 301 redirected around 7,000-8,000 pages Every day we find another 60-70 old pages that are giving 404’s Page titles and meta desciptions: Reoptimized al lthe product page titles and meta descriptions Doing same thing now for category pages Questions: Are we doing the wrong approach by setting up 301s for all these old pages? What if we just set up a robots exclusion definition for the /itemDetail and then tell google to remove all those old pages from the cache? I am a little worried about doing that because they have around a hundred or so inbound links to product pages so I hate to remove that link juice Also, can anyone suggest any issues with on page optimization?