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Is it possible that those subcategory pages were pulling in a lot of traffic.  Now that they are gone you are not getting traffic from their keywords? That is a guess.  If you want more information you will need to get traffic data from before and after for comparison.  That will tell you if you lost keywords entirely or if traffic for specific keywords fell.

thanks sha!

You should also add "noindex, noarchive" to your meta data headers on those pages.

You are right, these are &%*#(&d.  I don't see any usable pattern given the new URLs must use IDs from the new system (first example).  The second also needs new information (category) which no Regex will ever do. In that case you have a few options: Create a search function on the 404 page that will take the relevant part of the URL and perform a search on the new catalogue.  This won't be perfect but at least the visitors will get useful information to act on. If only a few 100 are important, write a individual rule for each page.  This can be done in a XSL file to speed up the process but it is a lot of work. After the top pages are finished, redirect the rest to catalogue home. Seriously consider upgrading to URL Rewrite 2 which can perform redirects against a databases of URLs.  This is more tedious and expensive but it allows you to add thousands of URL pairs – far more than any txt file should ever hold for performance reasons.  You can even write your own logic in the provider to do some of the search functions.  Then it behaves like #1 but redirect immediately to the best match. Good luck!

I commissioned around half a dozen pieces from TextBroker and I was utterly unimpressed. The pieces were not insightful, had very little thought behind them, and looked like they'd been written in about two minutes flat. On one of the pieces I paid for the top level "professional" service, and still the piece was very weak. I asked for it to be revised, but the revision did little to improve things. I'm steering clear.

A thought to consider is you may have links that you are not seeing. There are also bookmarks users may have along with e-mails which can offer a link to each page. Every product page represents potential sales. If a user who does follow a bookmark or link finds the page they expect, there is a much higher likelihood they may make a purchase on their next visit. If users are dumped on the home page they may close the browser window. Think about how you would react if a friend sent you a "hey, look at this great product" e-mail link and you found yourself on the home page of a company with 8000 products. It comes down to what type of company you are and how you wish to balance costs versus service. Is this a one person company who lists 8000 products and dropships orders from various suppliers? Or are you a large company with a warehouse which carries thousands of products and has a large staff. In the latter case, I would ensure all the pages are properly redirected. Keep in mind your redirects don't necessarily mean 8000 lines of individual code. Depending on your old and new URL structure, it is possible your entire site can be redirected with a single regex expression, or a relatively few of them.

Hey thanks. is there some tool or feature in google webmaster account that shows us info about the caching frequency? also, we only set up 301's for 400 of the 8,000 urls. only those 400 hand external links to them. it would be a massive project to redirect all those other 7,600 urls. do we need to do that?