Expired domain 301s — dead tactic or did I pick a bad domain?

Straight question, and no, this isn't a pitch. I know how it reads coming from me.

Client handed me an aged domain last month. Real history, links from 2012 to 2016, nothing spammy in the profile, niche adjacent but not identical. Old playbook says 301 it into the money page and watch something move. Redirect went live on the 4th, single hop, no chain, no wildcard nonsense.

Five weeks. Nothing moved. Not up, not down.

Depends what you're running, I know. But has anyone actually landed one of these in the last twelve months, or am I selling people a 2015 tactic?

You're selling people a 2015 tactic. I say that with affection, because I sold it too.

Here's the timeline as I lived it. Up to about 2016 you could 301 a dead plumbing site into a casino page and it would hold for months. 2017 it started wanting topical relevance. 2018 you needed the relevance and a live-looking site sitting on the old domain first. Then somewhere in 2019 — I can't give you a date, and anyone who gives you a date is guessing — the whole thing stopped carrying. Not penalised. Ignored. Which is worse, because there's nothing to diagnose.

What I think happens now is that the profile gets re-evaluated at the target, and most of what made a 2013 link valuable doesn't survive being looked at again. Your 2012 to 2016 links are precisely the links that no longer count.

Five weeks of nothing isn't bad luck. It's the tactic.

Sorry if I'm out of my depth replying to you, but this doesn't match what I saw.

I did one in September. Small domain, old local business, about 40 referring domains and honestly half of them were directories. 301'd it to a category page that had been sitting around position 30 for its main term. Six weeks later that page was position 9 and it's still there now.

I know that's one case. I changed nothing else that month, but I'm aware that isn't the same as proving anything. Just saying it wasn't nothing.

IME it still works, it's just gone from a lever to a nudge.

Two this year, both landed. Difference from the old days is you can't point it at a page that doesn't already rank for something. Redirect into a page at 30 and you might get 9. Redirect into a page at 90 and you get 90.

Redirect into a page at 30 and you might get 9.

That's the part I'd want a control for. A page at 30 moves to 9 on its own more often than anyone in this thread wants to admit, particularly on a site that's getting anything at all elsewhere.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying I've watched this board talk itself into things on exactly this evidence since 2014, and I was usually one of the people doing the talking.

Fair. I don't have a control.

Went and counted rather than argue. Of the domains I've sold in the last eighteen months where the buyer told me afterwards what happened — maybe thirty, and self-selecting, because happy buyers are the ones who write back — roughly a third reported movement inside two months.

Which is either a real third or a reporting artefact, and I genuinely can't tell from where I'm sitting. Would be an idiot to pretend otherwise given what I do for a living.

A third of the people who bothered to email you. That's not a number, that's a mood.

Four months on, and I'll give this one back to the thread: I tried one.

Aged domain, decent profile, pointed at a page sitting mid-teens. It moved. Six positions, held three weeks, then drifted back to where it started.

So it isn't dead. It's noise-shaped. Which is roughly what I said in a different thread in 2021 and got shouted at for, so I'll take the small win.