Is this 301 redirect project a failure?

tomchen29

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I acquired an expired domain 2 months ago to try out 301 redirect link building strategy. I rebuilt the website with original content from WaybackMachine, and it’s been indexed on Google since the 1st week it went online.

Now I have some problem with the website’s backlink indexing. From Ahrefs, the website has 800+ backlinks, including ones from powerful domain like WashingtonPost. However, GSC only shows 23 trivial backlinks after 2 months, where none of them comes from authority site.

Should I deem this project a failure, or should I still do the 301 redirect? Any advice is highly appreciated!
 
Have you checked the 800+ backlinks? Are they still in place and actually on sites like the Washington Post?
 
In my experience there was a problem with Mobile Browsers concerning the 301 redirect. The mobile phone browsers would just fetch the page to redirect and got to it without passying through the redirector. I think if your traffic is solely phone based this could be a problem...
 
Have you checked the 800+ backlinks? Are they still in place and actually on sites like the Washington Post?
Thanks for replying. Yes the authority backlinks are still alive

In my experience there was a problem with Mobile Browsers concerning the 301 redirect. The mobile phone browsers would just fetch the page to redirect and got to it without passying through the redirector. I think if your traffic is solely phone based this could be a problem...
got you. The expired website that I rebuilt has basically 0 traffic (although it's indexed), so traffic-wise might not be an issue
 
Even though Google doesn't show all of the links in the GSC and they should recrawl these links,
Usually most of the links are shown up in the GSC once the links tab start showing the links,
They're fetching them from their database and stored even before the website get's revived,

You should ignore the GSC for this and check some (or most) of these links cached versions,
If the cached versions dates are after the restoration dates, then Google has already considered them as a backlink for the domain once again,

Also changing the website URL, like non-www to www or vise versa as well as for http & https versions can cause such problems,
You'll need more time to let Google deal with the redirect (make sure you've implemented one),

If everything is in point,
Just send these links to indexing services if you really want to force recrawl them,
That's not even totally necessary tho,

I can't really come up with other reasons/problems without having more information about your case,
Let us know if any of the above applies
 
Even though Google doesn't show all of the links in the GSC and they should recrawl these links,
Usually most of the links are shown up in the GSC once the links tab start showing the links,
They're fetching them from their database and stored even before the website get's revived,

You should ignore the GSC for this and check some (or most) of these links cached versions,
If the cached versions dates are after the restoration dates, then Google has already considered them as a backlink for the domain once again,

Also changing the website URL, like non-www to www or vise versa as well as for http & https versions can cause such problems,
You'll need more time to let Google deal with the redirect (make sure you've implemented one),

If everything is in point,
Just send these links to indexing services if you really want to force recrawl them,
That's not even totally necessary tho,

I can't really come up with other reasons/problems without having more information about your case,
Let us know if any of the above applies
thanks for sharing the insight! I never know there's a cache version of a page by Google, looks quite handy.

Just checked the top backlinks. Looks like they all cached in October, at least a month after the site got rebuilt and indexed.
 
I acquired an expired domain 2 months ago to try out 301 redirect link building strategy. I rebuilt the website with original content from WaybackMachine, and it’s been indexed on Google since the 1st week it went online.

Now I have some problem with the website’s backlink indexing. From Ahrefs, the website has 800+ backlinks, including ones from powerful domain like WashingtonPost. However, GSC only shows 23 trivial backlinks after 2 months, where none of them comes from authority site.

Should I deem this project a failure, or should I still do the 301 redirect? Any advice is highly appreciated!
Before going ahead with the 301 redirect, it's important to check the quality of your acquired backlinks because Google is showing very few of them, and most aren't from authoritative sites, which might indicate potential issues with your strategy. So just be careful before proceeding
 
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