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I've only worked with PR web and had some good success. The best thing to do though?

If your website has any authority at all-- use the Google New "standout content tag" http://searchengineland.com/google-news-launches-standout-tag-for-featured-content-94256

And post the blog yourself as a story that you "broke."

I highly recommend that you don't abuse it. But if you had a website on...say...Maryland Real Estate and you use the "standout" tag, your own press release, from your own website, could land on page one of Google. I've done it many times. You just need to have a fairly reputable site and you have to let Google know that you are breaking the story and they won't find it anywhere else.

(Man, I hate to post this tip. I just know somebody is going to use it on every post on their site and get nailed. If you are that person: don't.)

You need to use the rel=canonical tag.

All of the duplicate pages (content/pages) need a tag in the head (the canonical tag)-- which points to the original.

That will solve your duplicate content problem.

I don't know if you'll need to do this, but depending on the coding language, you may need to have an if/then statement in your PHP, ruby, ASP...whatever.

IF this page isn't the original page THEN

ELSE

Do Nothing

END

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

First of all, PR is not as important as people think. Nothing to get that worked up about. What matters is: Has your traffic dropped? Has your ranking dropped?

I agree with Miriam. There is a company in Phoenix that calls themselves "Phoenix SEO" in the maps- even though that's not the name of the company. When you search for Phoenix SEO, one company dominates the search. Very odd. But it will surely be worked out.

I don't understand the purpose of the 301 redirect. If you are redirecting your fancy URL, that is "SEO optimized"-- then you are doing nothing. The only thing that will be indexed will be the non-fancy URL. If you 301 redirect anything, that page will not be indexed, so making a keyword-rich URL is useless. Instead, I would use only canonical tags.

So, for example, let's say you have a product page. And it's at example.com/product-name/

But it's also in other places example.com/tags/vases/product-name/

General accepted SEO practices would say that all of the additional or supplemental pages should have the rel=canonical point to the "original." (Not redirected back to the original.)

However, because Google seems to be favoring breadcrumbs more than ever-- you might want to pick a page with breadcrumbs (Page B) and make that page the canonical. You could try it both ways with different products and see how it goes.

Now, please bear in mind that I just thought of this as I was answering your question, and this is just something to think about- I haven't actually tried this, but I might...

In other words, if I had:

example.com/400-watt-halide-bulb/

but I also had it in:

example.com/light-bulbs/halide/400-watt-halide-bulb/

I might point all examples of that product to the longer, breadcrumbed URL with the canonical link. But again, just thinking out loud.

When you redesigned the site, did you change the URLs?

For example, did you change--

example.com/miami-homes/ to example.com/miami-homes.asp?

And if so, did you 301 redirect all of the old pages to their new locations?

With the info provided, that's my best guess.

No... I mean your SERPs...

Did you lose position your SERP for your keywords?

Because if your pagerank went down, but you kept your ranking positions, and traffic increased--

Who cares?

That just adds to my original point: PR doesn't matter much.

Search for "fighting breast cancer"

Or "fight breast cancer"

Or "delayed diagnosis of breast cancer"

or "failure to diagnose breast cancer" (highly desired by attorneys)

Look at the site (in the Google results) fighting-breast-cancer.com

It has a low page rank, but I that site ranks well for any phrase related to breast cancer. It has very few links and low PR.

I can give you lots of examples of sites on Page 1 of Google with very low page rank.

Yes, if you redirect URL B, it will not be indexed as content. It will be ignored by Google.

Well... Not ignored, but Google will acknowledge the URL B shouldn't be indexed.