How many steps for a 301 redirect becomes a "bad thing"

[CeCeBar]

OK, so I am not going to worry now about being a purist with the htaccess file, I can't seem to redirect the old pages without redirect errors (project is an old WordPress site to a redesigned WP site).

And the new site has a new domain name; and none of the pages (except the blog posts) are the same.

I installed the Simple 301 redirects plugin on old site and it's working (the Redirection plugin looks very promising too, but I got a warning it may not be compatible with the old non-supported theme and older v. of WP).

Now my question using one of the redirect examples (and I need to know this for my client, who is an internet marketing consultant so this is going to be very important to them!):

Using Redirect Checker, I see that

http://creativemindsearchmarketing.com/blog

--- 301 redirects to

http://www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com/blog

--- which then 301 redirects to final permanent location of

http//www.cmsearchmarketing.com/blog

How is Google going to perceive this 2-step process? And is there any way to get the "non-www-old-address" and also the "www-old-address" to both redirect to final permanent location without going through this 2-stepper?

Any help is much appreciated.

_Cindy

[AlecPR]

I wouldn't think you need to worry. Matt Cutts covered this a little while ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) - basically he says that with each redirect, the url looses a little link juice, and when it runs out, google will stop following the rabbit hole; but for just a few chained 301's there's no problem.

[loopyal]

Hello Cindy Another thing you could consider is to remove the www redirector and see if that then does the correct redirect immediately That would stop the doubles and as the domain isn't going to be in the index eventually, you don't care about having both the www and non-www live.