Questions
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Baffled by this site's inability to rank
Hi Blaze-Communication! Any way you can provide any more information, or a link to your site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney0 -
What's the best way to deal with deleted .php files showing as 404s in WMT?
Those pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but if there are still sites (either pages within your own site or others) that are linking to any of those pages you will continue to see 404 error codes. I'm working on fixing the same issue on a site that I just started optimizing. The best thing you can do is a 301 redirect from each of the old .php pages to a similar, relevant page that currently exists on the site. This will fix the 404 codes and also pass any page authority from the old page to the new page that it is being directed to. Here's some helpful info from Moz on 301 redirects: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection Hope that helps!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | garrettkite0 -
Can the sudden addition of a new section of a website cause the site to be sandboxed?
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).
Technical SEO Issues | | LynnPatchett0