Google seems to have penalised one section of our site? Is that possible?

[jack86]

We have a page rank 5 website and we launched a new site 6 months ago in February.

Initially we had horrible urls with a bunch of numbers and stuff and we since changed them to lovely human readable urls. This had an excellent effect across the site except on one section of the site:

http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduate-employers

Although Google has indexed these pages and several have a PR 2 they do not appear in Google when previously they were on page 1 when we had the old urls. We figured we just needed some time for Google to get used to it, but it hasn't done anything. It is also worth mentioning we changed the page titles from:

FIRM NAME | DOMAIN NAME

then...

FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships | DOMAIN NAME

then..

FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships

Do you think these are being penalised?

There are two types of page:

Example A:

http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/addleshaw-goddard.htm

Example B:

http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/accenture.htm

[RyanPurkey]

Have you double checked the redirection to these pages to confirm it's correct from old to new.  Also, you could put the canonical tag on these pages that you want listed.

[jack86]

Thanks Ryan. We have 301's set up on these pages. However, some pages have been added since then after all of the changes and also don't perform well? I don't know if that makes a difference?

[RyanPurkey]

No, that makes sense. Have you checked this section of your site for external links and the like?  I went through your site's robots.txt and it appears to be ok, and it looks like you're in Google Webmaster Tools so you should see any standard warnings there.  If everything seems in order, I'd breakdown the individual sections of the site by length strength and see what comes up by comparison.  Also run SEOmoz' Competitive Link Research Tool (http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect) using pages that currently outrank your target keywords for this section and see if you can acquire some of those links to help boost this area of the site.

[jack86]

Thanks again Ryan. Yer, we can't seem to see any issues either, maybe we just need to wait and build up links to them...