Redirecting to a new domain... a second time

[TomNYC]

Hi all,

I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this:

1. Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we...

2. Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to...

3. third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL.

My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right?

The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3)

Thanks for any insights on this!

Tom

[Ray-pp]

FWIW, I think you executed appropriately. I would have redirected 1 -> 3 and 2 -> 3 just as you did. It is going to take a while for the authority to catch up to the new (#3) domain and I would expect a lot of that authority coming from 2 -> 3 since 1 -> 2 has had a lot of time for its authority to pass to the #2 domain.

[LauraSultan]

You were right to redirect 1 directly to 3. It's not a huge problem to have short redirect chains, but the best practice is to redirect to the current live site.