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Keyword / Listing Problems With New Site
Hi all, just built a new website to replace an old clunker. As expected, when we switched the websites out, our search engine rankings took a hit. What we didn't expect is the magnitude of the hit.
For starters, our previous hosting company seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving us with a bunch of old urls that lead to 403 Forbidden errors. I know this must be hurting our SE standings, but do any of you have an idea as to how much this issue alone would hamstring us? Obviously, this is something we need to fix ASAP, but our contacts from the last company are completely unresponsive. Assuming they've disappeared into the aether never to be seen again, do you fine folks have any ideas as to how to solve this problem ourselves? Is there any way to inform Google et. al. that these sites no longer exist?
My second big problem is that one of our keywords that shows up in the titles, body of the page and in the meta tags doesn't seem to be getting picked up at all by the search engines. We aren't just keyword spamming here - this phrase is more or less the core of our business. I would understand if we were just showing up low on the listing ranks, but analytic tools suggests the SEs aren't indexing the keyword at all. Anybody ever encounter this? The keyword was all over the old 403'd site, too - would that lead to the keyword being blocked simply due to interference from the old site?
I know at least a couple of these questions must highlight my cluelessness in the realm of SEO, but any input would be greatly appreciated.
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