I saw an interesting post from Barry at SER today where he talked about chained 301 redirects not passing link love. Thinking about it, this would explain a situation I hit last year where a site was doing fairly well up until a rebranding forced a domain name change. Development implemented a 301 chain (301, followed by something else that I can’t recall, followed by a final 301). After the rebranding, the new site took a long time to build back up, almost as if it were a new site. If chaining the 301 means that the benefits of the 301 are not realized, then that’s exactly what it was to the engines - a brand new site… Good to know.