MSN and 301 redirect

I recently changed some of my pages names to more SEF friendly filenames such as keyword-sensitive.htm instead of page1.htm. I then added a 301 redirect to point the SE traffic to the right page. This has caused my site to lose virtualy all of my MSN traffic. Last month I received 21,459 visitors from MSN. This month I have only received just over 3000. Is this a short term problem that will fix itself or does MSN have a problem with 301 redirects? Or it is something else?

Thanks for your help.

 

when i placed a 301 direct from old doamin 2 new one earlier this year msn never seemed t have a problem with it.

 

Interesting. 301 redirects are usually very safe.

Here's a thread that might be interesting, shows how you might have to wait two or three weeks...

forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=12602

 

There is a chance that the new pages will rank themselves.

 

I just am concerned that MSN is viewing my 301 redirect as duplicate content and removing my pages as a penalty. I've read about that in a few places. If it is just a matter of waiting a few weeks for the new pages to be ranked, that is fine.

 

It all depends on factors such as how many incoming links exist to the redirect url and the url it is being redirected to.

 

to be honest, I don't understand it myself.
When typing in "real estate forum", this url pops up
http://www.national-real-estate-directory.com/real-estate-forum/index.php?

which makes no sense to me where they got that from.
Even when you type in http://www.national-real-estate-directory.com/real-estate-forum without the closing "/", it redirects to http://www.national-real-estate-directory.com/real-estate-forum/ and not the url they have indexed.

Mike

 

I am now up to 550 pages in MSN. It looks like things will be fine. My rankings now suck however. Maybe that will fix itself as well. I was hoping the backlinks would carry throught since I did a premanent redirect, but maybe not.

 

I think the switching things around will hurt, once it stabilizes, you will be alright.

 

Thanks for the post, I myself was going to do the same thing with SEF urls... then decided not to take the risk because once I did something of the same nature and google didnt like it at all and dropped the page out back into the 400 range

 

I wouldn't advise against sef url's. You might want to try a couple to see how it affects your site before launching it on all of your pages. I had the falloff in MSN due to the change but it looks to be improving. Regarding google, since the change, my google traffic has doubled. SEF url's are always a good idea. Best of luck to you.