First of all, whether something issues redirections or actually proxies some other site is easy to tell by hitting F12 in your favourite browser and checking the network requests. With your configuration, I would doubt there is a 301 coming from NGINX.
Second, why do you think this will be caching anything if there is no proxy_cache directive? You should add something like
proxy_cache website_cache;
and define this like
proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx/website/ levels=1:2 keys_zone=website_cache:10m max_size=512m inactive=120m use_temp_path=off;
You should then see the cache get populated by replied from the Apache server.
--j.
Second, why do you think this will be caching anything if there is no proxy_cache directive? You should add something like
proxy_cache website_cache;
and define this like
proxy_cache_path /var/cache/nginx/website/ levels=1:2 keys_zone=website_cache:10m max_size=512m inactive=120m use_temp_path=off;
You should then see the cache get populated by replied from the Apache server.
--j.