Can the sudden addition of a new section of a website cause the site to be sandboxed?

[Blaze-Communication]

Hi there,

We have noticed a sudden drop in traffic for certain keywords. It seems to correlate precisely with a different department adding a whole new recruitment section to the site. However there doesn't appear to be any keyword cannibalization or duplicate content issues.

Any ideas would be most appreciated.

Thanks

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Its easy to tie correlation to causation but you need to be sure and the addition of a new site section should not usually cause a traffic drop for existing pages. If there really is no cannibalization / duplicate content then first thing is to verify there were no other technical issues caused at the same time (moz crawls should show new issues cropping up). If nothing technical is apparent then I would look at what pages lost traffic and extrapolate from that (and your rankings) what keywords seem to have lost traction. If nothing else changed content wise over that time then have a look at what sites gained positions for these keywords (maybe some competitors upped their game) and also look at known google algo updates (maybe you got caught in one of them).