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If you have a one page website you may want to ensure it doesn't have a canonical URL issue. It your website doesn't 301 redirect to either to www or non www version it could be indexing your home page separately as two unique pages.

1. Typically Google will display the result that they feel to be the legitimate source. However, I have had pages with stolen content appear higher in the SERPs because the website had a higher domain or page authority.

2. Duplicate content is never a pretty picture, and yes it can hurt your rankings. It can hurt them by having multiple pages from your website removed from the Google index if they have been flagged as duplicates.

Ryan's answer is the correct one. One thing I'd like to add is that there are also handy plugins available within firefox that allows you to search using depersonalized results.

I believe this one should work.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/depersonalization

Without knowing the exact URL and which pages were redirected it is difficult to predict why your rankings have dropped. I've made a laundry list of areas that may be causing the issue.

1. Onsite Factors have Changed

If the content on the website has change significantly then your website may be less relevant to the keywords you are targeting. That could cause an instant drop. I would also check the onsite factors such as Title tags and URL structure.

2. Speed

I personally use WordPress so I know it's quite speedy, however, if your new site has a slower load time that can sometimes lead to a drop in rankings. Did you move to a new host after the redesign? If the new host is slower that could also be causing the problem.

3. Internal Linking Structure

Did your old website has a significant amount of internal links that were passing juice? If the new design doesn't feature internal links that could be the cause.

4. Double check the 301 redirects

I'd ensure that the SEO firm you are working with has actually completed the redirects. It may also be worth while to check your domain authority to ensure that you have actually redirected all of the pages that were passing value. If your domain authority has dropped, that may be an indication that not all of the important pages have been redirected properly.

5. Submit your new sitemap

It may be as simple as Google has not yet had an opportunity to index all of the new pages properly. I'd ensure you do a sitemap submission through the webmasters interface just to make sure.

Once again I don't have enough info to provide you with an exact solution, however, these are common ranking issues and may be worth investigating.

This type of SEO drives me crazy and it's one of the aspects of SEO that makes me want to pull my hair out. Typically you see "SEO" companies that participant in awful, obviously black hat SEO and they rank quickly and for a long time. A white hat SEO tries to build quality links but it's near impossible to dislodge these websites when faced with the overwhelming value provided from these spammy websites.

I'd be happy to take a look at the website's backlink profile as well (PM Me). I recently came up against a massive link pyramid that I had to compete against and I know how frustrating it can be.

For starters it is never "safe" to purchase links, be it high PR links, or spammy links. Purchasing links can lead to serious penalties and worse the devastating Google ban.

Secondly, and someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't believe .edu links pass any more value than a .com, .org, .net, ect. So this appears to be a simple advertising ploy. They are most definitely not going to be posting your links to the Harvard University website and 100 others for $30.

This type of question is asked all the time, what is the best way to build links quickly and effectively. My answer is to not focus on what seems like an "easy" solution, instead spend some time researching what your competitors are up to, the hubs in your industry, and relevant sources such as forms and blogs; typically you can find some great linking opportunities that won't cost your a penny, and will provide much more value to your website.

C

P.S. Open Site Explorer is great for that.

Are you using a content management system like wordpress or joomla? Or is it a straight HTML / CSS website?

Daniel you rock! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for.

Thanks again.

Hi,

My client just had there website redeveloped within wordpress. I just ran a crawl errors test for their website using Google Webmasters. I discovered that the client has about six hundred, 404 pages. Most of the error pages originated from their previous image gallery.

I already have a custom 404 page set-up, but is there something else I should be doing? Is it worth while to 301 redirect every single page within the .htaccess file, or will Google filter these pages out of its index naturally?

Thanks Mozers!