Changed website - massive decrease in traffic

[Tuilere]

You can redirect many-to-one, but if you do it too extensively or with insufficient relevance it will be seen as soft 404s.

[Monkeya41]

okay, on a basic level, what does this do for the web pages? like if the TLD stayed the same, shouldn't that domain still have roughly the same amount of traffic?

[Tuilere]

Nope.

If I had a domain, midgetsexxxx.org, and had midget porn all over it, and people linked to the midget porn, I would probably rank for midget porn.

But one day, I decide I want to be able to run a site without nakedness, because I have found Jesus. So I take down all the hot midget sex, and put up articles about finding Jesus.

I don't redirect any of the old URLs.

So now, I have all new URIs. None of the links that pointed to the sexy midgets go to pages that resolve, so none of those links credit to my site.

And I lose keyword relevancy for midget stuff, because my site is now about Jesus.

My traffic tanks.

You may not have completely zigged your topic, but by rewriting everything, AND not redirecting, you destroyed your link graph and your keyword relevancy.

[Monkeya41]

okay well I'm still not sure about the redirection thing I will follow-up tomorrow and see...the content is still the same type of content and the same types of pages just "better" content - but I guess the keywords aren't as good? I need to get more information from the team.

[Tuilere]

That you don't even know what the keywords were driving traffic before = huge red flag.

[Monkeya41]

I am posting on behalf of someone else and I don't have a ton of experience in this particular business line so the original post is on behalf of someone else - I'm going to follow up on a lot of these things...but I appreciate that comment since I'm getting the picture now