Sorry to hear this. This is exactly what happened to us the last couple years. In 2021 we tried redirecting our very old site to a brand new domain that was very similar to the old one, just shorter and better. We waited over 3 months and the rankings and traffic just wouldn't come back. So we switched back to the old domain and rankings and traffic came back in less than a week.
Fast forward to this year, we tried again thinking that that "new domain" was no longer new and would probably work better. Wrong, same result. So we switched back to old domain.
Everything with the redirect was triple checked and then checked again. We also used Google's "Change of Address" tool. It just wouldn't work.
In the Podcast at the bottom of this recent article they basically admit site move redirects don't work half the time, or they take way longer than any business can wait:
[
seroundtable.com...]
Frustrating how you always get non-committal answers. Pretty vague.
One guy said waiting a year is the max but then they all admit few businesses can wait that long. When pressed for a shorter time limit answer they all dance around the question and over complicate it. Keeping things vague and mysterious. Masters of misinformation over there.
Anyway my theory is Google quietly made redirects, especially to brand new domains, not work anymore. Sure some people have success with it however I'm coming across more people who aren't having success with it. They may be manually approving or disapproving every redirect over there now in order to fight spam. Not sure.
All that being said we've had some mixed success redirects older sites to other older sites. Sites that have been up for multiple years now consolidating into another older site.
