I had a serious performance problem related to url-rewrite component for my Joomla site. So at the end we decided to switch it to another component and trouble begins... In this switching period lots of new invalid urls emerged and previous urls are lost. We are trying to recover this situation but Google shows >10000 404s currently. And imy traffic is also dropped to 1/2 of the previous state. (Because >%80 of my traffic is coming from google) So i guess the traffic decrease is because of a penalty coming from 404 errors. What is your experience related to this? Is this a tempprary or permanent penalty? We are trying to fix the errors and i guess >%90 of the previous urls are fixed but we now have invalid urls indexed. Do you think once we finish recovering previous urls, i should put invalid urls to my htaccess file to be dropped from Google index? How can i save myself from this situation and what is your expectation about the final result? Note: My site is a PR6 site having 6000+ of (mostly PR3+) inner pages. Thanks.
you should have done a little more planning and research before you did such a dramatic change to your site. you are in a messy situation. Decide which set of urls you are going to use and stick to it..never change it again.. Once you recover your previous urls then your traffic should slowly return in the meantime set a 404 redirect in your .htacces file