Remus's answer is good.  I would add to that that Google has their first link filter.  If you have two links pointing from page A to page B, Google only passes link authority (pagerank) and reputation (keywords in the anchor text and relevant surrounding text) through the first link that appears in the code.  The second link does not pass anything.  So, whatever the anchor text of the first link in the code is, that's the anchor text Google is going to use (Remus is right that anchor text has become less important).

The second link does, however, dilute the amount of pagerank passed.  So, like Remus pointed out, each link in your scenario only passes 20% of the pagerank.  Since Google ignores the second link to the shoe page, that 20% of pagerank does not get passed.  I'm not sure if it stays on the page or just gets lost.

So, what does this all mean?  From an SEO standpoint, you want the link with the targeted keyword to be first in the code if you have more than one link to a page.  Also, you don't really want to have two links to the same page on that one page.  Now, that's from an SEO perspective.  From a user perspective, it may make perfect sense to have that second link and the page may convert better.  So, you'd just have to decide which is more important...and it's probably the user perspective that's more important.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

You're right that the search engines are treating the new pages like...well...new pages.  It has nothing to do with how much code has changed and everything to do with the fact that they simply have new URLs.

I agree with Alan.  Two weeks isn't a terribly long time.  Obviously, it's best to have all your ducks in a row from the start, but I think there's good chance that just from setting up the proper redirects for the pages the site should now transfer, though it may take few weeks and you may not get completely back to where you were.

As far as submitting the sitemap for all the old pages, I'm not sure what that would do.  It's possible it may do exactly what you want, basically tell Google about all the redirects, but then again, Google may think it's a bit odd putting up a sitemap to redirected pages.

If the content is originally yours, then you can add canonical tags.  It's not a guarantee that the search engines will follow those tags, but it's a start.  You could also try to report the competitor site to Google and Bing and tell them they are stealing your content.  Keep in mind the search engines usually take a while to respond.

If your site stole the content, then you just need to remove it and create your own, unique content.

• Kurt Steinbrueck
  OurChurch.Com