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We have a network of websites in Linux-based PHP and we may be switching them over to ASP.NET and using SiteCore CMS.  Right now, we don't have a CMS.  We would also be switching from using file extension www.site.com/file.php to no extensions www.site.com/file/ therefore altering our directory structure.  We are aware of the potential impacts to traffic of the initial migration, but are now more curious about SiteCore CMS and SEO, performance and indexation/crawlability. Has anyone made this move before or considered making it?  Can you offer any success stories, horror stories?

I found an interesting discussion on seoroundtable where Barry Schwartz and others were discussing using robots.txt to block low quality content areas affected by Panda. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-farmer-advice-13090.html The article is a bit dated. I was wondering what current opinions are on this. We have some dynamically generated content pages which we tried to improve after panda.  Resources have been limited and alas, they are still there.  Until we can officially remove them I thought it may be a good idea to just block the entire directory.  I would also remove them from my sitemaps and resubmit.  There are links coming in but I could redirect the important ones (was going to do that anyway).  Thoughts?

Has anyone noticed issues with Gmail deliverability and spam inboxing happening around the same time as other large Google updates?  For example, if Google blasted your site in Panda or Penguin, have anyone seen them use the same judgement across into Gmail deliverability to blacklist your domain?

We own and operate more than two dozen educational related sites.  The business team is attempting to standardize some parts of our site hierarchy so that our sitemap.php, about.php, privacy.php and contact.php are all at the root directory.  Our sitemap.php is generated by our sitemap.xml files, which are generated from our URLlist.txt files. I need to provide some feedback on this initiative. I'm worried about adding more stand-alone pages to our root directory and as part of a separate optimization in the future I was planning to suggest we group the "privacy", "about" and "contact" pages in a separate folder. We generally try to put our most important pages/directories for SEO in the root as our homepages pass a lot of link juice and have high authority. We do not invest SEO time into optimizing these pages as they're not pages we're trying to rank for, and I've already been looking into even no-following all links to them from our footer, sitemap, etc. I know that adding these "corporate" pages to a site are usually a standard part of the design process but is there any SEO benefit to having them at the root?  And along the same lines, is there any SEO harm to having unimportant pages at the root? What do you guys think out there in Moz land?