This is regarding my 4 years old wordpress blog http://ReviewOfWeb.com/ . For some reason I was feeling more adventurous on Oct/15th, 2011 and thought of experimenting with permalink structure on my blog. The existing permalink structure was /%category%/%postname%/ PHP: . I changed it to /%postname%/%post_id%/ PHP: and then realizing it may affect existing Google rankings of my website I reverted to /%category%/%postname%/ PHP: This was all done within a span of half hour. Since that day, I see my traffic has reduced to half. Earlier the traffic used to average 650 visits/day now it is averaging 325 visits/day as per Google Analytics. Any inputs of why this is happening and what can be done to get my traffic back? Thanks
It's possible that google bot was on your site in that half hour time span finding nonexistent links. Did you check if number of pages indexed (site:domain.com) changed? I think everything should be back to normal in a month or so when google reindexes the interwebs.
I believe there's nothing to worry. Just wait for a couple of days. You can infact without any worry change your permalink structure as long as you do a proper 302 redirection for all your post links. That is very easy with the redirection plugin. let me know if you have more queries. P.S: I moved my main domain from socialat.com to my present blog on my signature in this March 2011. I never lost PR or visitors. I used a permanent wildcard redirection of my previous domain. You can see that I have a PR4 for my homepage and almost my inner post links have got a PR2+ and some even got PR4.
The number of pages remains the same so I'm sure it is not the problem with Google re-indexing. >>As i said I reverted my permalink structure within half an hour so there is no need of redirection. I think it has something to do with wordpress categories.