You probably should have 301'd your old pages instead of deleting them. The switch over would have been automatic and you wouldn't have lost any of the PR or backlinks that the old pages might have had.

301d meaning that all pages still had to exist on my server, correct?
im not familiar with that, is that a redirect thing?

301d meaning that all pages still had to exist on my server, correct?

Unfortunately yes.

im not familiar with that, is that a redirect thing?

Yes, it's an htaccess redirect. It basically tells search engines that 'this page is permanently moving to this page'

This thread explains it pretty well:
Redirect 301 - how is this really done? [webmasterworld.com]

I did it after a complete redesign of our site where every page had to change from html to shtml.
We did 301 redirects on every page (approx 900) and they worked great. The pages never dropped in rank and Google recognized the switch right away.

The ftp directory is a bit cluttered now though :-)

301d meaning that all pages still had to exist on my server, correct?

Unfortunately yes.

Fortunately, no.

The original request for the old page never gets to the page. It's intercepted by .htaccess and served the 301 to the new page.

oh really? cool. I need to clean up my directories. thanks.