I'm looking for some guidance on an issue I believe we created for ourselves and if we undo what we did.
We recently added attributed search to our sites. This of course created a bunch of dynamically generated URLS. For various reasons, it was decided to take some of our existing static URLs and 301 redirect them to their dyanamic counterpart.
Ex .../Empire-Paintball-Masks-0Y.aspx now redirects to .../Paintball-Masks-And-Goggles-0Y.aspx?Manufacturer=Empire
Many of these stat URLS had top 3 rankings for their associated keywords. Now, we don't rank for anything. I realize that 301 redirecting is the way to go...if you NEED to. My guess is our drop in keyword ranking is directly tied to what we did.
I'm looking for an solid argument to be made to my boss as to why we should not have done this and that it, more than likely has resulted in dropped keyword rankings and organic traffic.
I welcome any input.
Also, if we decided to revert back (remove all 301 redirects and de-index all dynamic URLS), what is the likely hood we can recapture some of this lost organic traffic? Can I disallow indexing in a robot.txt file to remove, say anything with a '?' in the URL? Would the above URL example (which was ranking in the top 3 in SERPs), have a good chance of finding its way back?
thanks
