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"Could the /redirect cause a problem when crawled by Google"
Possibly. What type of redirect is it? 301, 302 JavaScript, Meta Refresh?

Michael, answering your question fully will require analyzing your site, and probably your traffic and GWT data. If you can post your site url, I'll take a brief look at it. If you can put together a traffic data graph showing your drops in traffic and how they coincided with what changes you were making to your site, that would be helpful, too.

It is increasingly become less beneficial to choose a domain name with your keywords in it. I would generally suggest that you create your own brand, rather than choosing a domain name based on keywords.

Why?

• Consumers prefer and trust brands more than keyword domains
• Google is increasingly penalizing or not rewarding domains that have keywords in them
• Google prefers brands

I would only make the comments dofollow if you are going to police them carefully and delete links to any poor quality or shady websites.

Just because there was no manual action taken doesn't rule out a penalty. It could be an algorithmic penalty.

Have you used the SEOmoz crawler to look for possible technical issues?

Yes, a site I worked with lost all traffic on the 6th. See http://www.seomoz.org/q/website-penalized-3-times-by-google

It sounds like it was a change in the duplicate content algorithms.

I think I understand. Since your site was de-indexed, Google has to start over indexing your site on the new domain. This is what should happen:

Google will follow any external links it finds pointing to your site, will find the 301 redirect, and will follow that to your new site. Google will then crawl your new domain. Google will "forward" most of the link juice from your backlinks to your new domain.

Via your internal link structure, the forwarded PageRank will be spread throughout your site. This will hopefully result in you regaining the rankings you previously had.

I assume you have forwarded each subpage on the old domain to the same page on the new domain?

I would also:

a) if you can, change over at least some of your backlinks to point to your new domain

b) build/attract links to your new domain

I would just leave the old links and start building new, good links.

I would double-check that their site is clean and remove anything poor, though.

Google will only index your pages if it deems they are "worthy". However, you can certainly give Googlebot some encouragement. A good way to do this is to setup an XML sitemap and submit it via Google Webmaster Tools.

Are your articles unique or are they syndicated?

"maybe I need to upload the website with the old domain again and let google re-index it and only then do the 301, what do you think about that ?"

I'm not 100% certain, but I can't think of any reason you would need to do that.

Thorsten,

That's a bit tough to answer quickly, because there are so many things that could negatively affect the trust or authority of a website. A few include:

Other websites the page/site links to

Usage or gray or black hat tactics

Quality of content on the site

Overall quality of the site

Authority of the linking page

Well, it's probably either the code on your website or the server.

If it's the code, a good programmer can help you find and fix the issue.

If it's the server, your hosting company should fix it...if not, switch hosts.

Without access to your site, I don't have many more suggestions.

OK. Well, my suggested strategy would be:

1. Go through the list Todd gave to make sure that there is nothing wrong on your site. If not, you can probably assume it was a Google algorithm tweak, so proceed to...
2. Work on improving your site, starting with any areas you know of that might be an issue. I would say any content that is not unique would be a good place to start.

Creating an entire marketing and branding strategy is far beyond the scope of a simple Q&A thread. I would suggest hiring an hourly consultant to assist you in creating a strategy.

Andy, getting white hat links often requires a lot of creativity and elbow grease. This webinar is a good place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/seomoz-tools-acquire-whitehat-links

Search engines can and sometimes do crawl JavaScript, but you shouldn't count on them to do so.

Based on my understanding (I haven't used it):

The tool doesn't turn duplicate content into unique. Rather, if you have duplicate URLs to access the same content on your site, the tool attempts to fix that.

I would switch the OpenCart URLs to something more static/search friendly first.

Oh, so you want some in-house/on-site training?

I would try SEOmoz partner Distilled: http://www.distilled.co.uk/contact.html