Certain PHP Pages Not Showing In SERPs

[HB17]

Hi all,

You've all been so helpful so far, I'm hoping you can help me with our trickiest SEO question yet.

Last year we migrated 7 sites into one, going from flat html to Joomla. This went fine and although we saw a slight drop in traffic, it wasn't too bad.

Now however traffic has started to drop and we've been able to hone it down into a certain area of our website.

Each of the 7 sites had their own page with some php code that was fed products. These products were updated everyday and were are second most popular page on the sites aprt from the home page. These pages were found in Google no problem and were an essential resource for our site.

What we have found is these pages cannot be found at all, unless you type the full business name and product. If you just type the product and the location our customer is based in, we're no where, using the Moz tools it says we're not in the top 50 results. This is a bit of a shock since we used to be at least on the first page, usually quite high up.

I'm a little stumped as SEO wise these pages are technically better. They offer the same functionality but in a much more SEO friendly way.

I've asked our developer to check:

Nothing is being blocked in robots.txt
The pages are being indexed
There's no strange code errors

Essentially the pages can't be found even if we type the full title, for example 'customer's products in their town' to be found we have to type 'customer's products in their town and their full business name'.

The top third of the page is just html text, the bottom like I mentioned is PHP and is fed data from a database which is refreshed each morning.

I know our developer did some rel conical work but has assured me that's all working fine.

While I know it's a new website, we've owned the domain for a while so our domain authority isn't brand new and 0, we also have pages with worse page authority that show up on page 1 no problem, so I'm leaning towards something else might not be right.

Can anyone help me figure out why these pages are being indexed but not even found?

Thanks!

[LauraSultan]

This sort of thing is very difficult to troubleshoot without the site URL and page in question. Feel free to message me privately, and I can take a look

There are so many variables that can be affected when you migrate sites, especially if you are combining multiple sites under a single domain name.  You really need to perform a full technical audit after any kind of migration or redesign.  Here are a few things that I would check right away.

• Were 301-redirects were set up properly? If they weren't, you may be losing the value of your backlinks.
• Are there any duplicate content problems created by Joomla?
• Was the information architecture or linking structure changed significantly in the process?
• Are there any files left on the server from the old static site that are still indexed by the search engines? (I found this recently during an audit.)

[HB17]

Thank you for your answer!

Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to give out the url at this stage.

Could you elaborate about the 301-redirects? Our developer set these up and asked us simply where the old urls would go on the new site.

Duplicate content - There are 2 or 3 ways to get to these pages which aren't showing in SERPs, our developer has set up a rel conical to avoid duplicate content but could there be an issue there?

I've asked our developer to look into old files from the static site, is there anything in particular I should be asking him to search for?

Thank you!

[LauraSultan]

Like I said, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to diagnose this kind of problem without the URL.

Learn more about 301 redirects at http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection .