Messed up due to 301 redirects, any suggestions?

Hi guys,

I had a very popular website with 20K UVs a day but I did not like the domain (was very long) so I redirected it to a better domain.

I lost the rankings. It took 2 weeks and it regained the rankings, but due to trademark issues, I again redirected the new domain to another domain the next day and now after 1 month, rankings are nowhere near the previous positions and I get only 4K UVs now.

(Could not use Webmaster tools as it does not support domain.com to newdomain.com/subfolder redirects)

This is what I did:

Day 1:
Domain1 >> Domain2/subfolder (301)

Day 14 (Domain2 started ranking):
Domain1 >> Domain3/subfolder (301)
Domain2 >> Domain3 (Removed after 2 weeks; 301, Webmaster Tools change of address)

The redirection is correct but even after 1 month, rankings have not improved. Site has 3000 pages.

Should I wait a bit more or move the site to Domain1 again?

Why don't you just remove the previous redirect and 301's domain 1 to domain 3 ?
and use the webmaster tool domain name change option

lilmasta said:

Why don't you just remove the previous redirect and 301's domain 1 to domain 3 ?
and use the webmaster tool domain name change option

Click to expand...

I did 301 redirect Domain1 to Domain3. Also redirected Domain2 to Domain3 because now Domain2 was ranking.

Cannot use the change of address option because it only supports Domain.com to AnotherDomain.com redirects, but I had to redirect my main domain to a subfolder of the new domain like NewDomain.com/OldDomain

Just do site 1 to site 3.

Site 2 is useless without the 301 from site 1

asap1 said:

Just do site 1 to site 3.

Site 2 is useless without the 301 from site 1

Click to expand...

I agree. I completely removed site 2, two weeks after the redirect when all the new pages had alredy been indexed.
Now, only site 1 redirects to site 3.

Removal did help, as the site moved from 2K Uvs/Day to 4K UVs but it's nowhere near the previous positions.

Nothing else you can do but check and make sure the 301 is 100% correct.

The rest is up to Google.

give it some time, meanwhile create some citation links to the new domain, a PR saying you have changed your domain name would be something you should consider, Its always best to do domain to domain redirect instead of the folders. Anyways i wish you luck

redirect in cpanel root level