I’ve just been dealing with expired domain abuse. This is how you can too.
How Did I Find the Expired Domain Abuse?
I was looking through Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools’ Recommendations tab to check crawl errors and found that there were a couple of dozen moderate errors. The SEO error type I was analysing were “Meta descriptions on many of your pages are too short.”
Skimming through the list, they were mostly for WordPress tags, but there were about three legitimate blog post URLs in there. Two URLs were from recent articles in 2024, but there was an old blog post in there dating back to 2010.
Now this PaulMackenzieRoss.com blog itself dates back to 2007, so a 2010 post is pretty early and now fifteen years old. I did think about simply culling the post because it’s so old and may no longer be relevant. Also, the subject of the blog post is an online SEO tool that is no longer available. (It has been superseded by the likes of Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, etc.)
However, I don’t like just killing off old pages because to me they’re also a record of history. This probably isn’t an important piece of internet history, but I chose to leave it in place nonetheless.
My many years of habit in optimising website content kicked in here though. I decided to write a new, lengthy enough meta description just to reduce the SEO errors in Bing Webmaster Tools. Then I manually scanned the page for potential fixes. There were a couple of external links and I double-checked them.
The first issue was that they were HTTP links, not HTTPS links. With this old blog post, being from August 2010, having HTTP links was OK at the time. It wasn’t until 2014 that Google announced that HTTPS would be a ranking factor. And then, over the next few years, we transitioned to HTTPS and browsers started to warn users that they were about to use an HTTP link and that their connection was “Not Secure”.
So I simply changed HTTP to HTTPS in the links I placed in the post 15 years ago.
Then another habit of mine occurred – I just couldn’t help myself. I wanted to check the new HTTPS URLs were OK, and to ensure that I had the right destination page’s headlines in the link title attributes (This is what I do to be comprehensive for my users, I think it helps particularly for UX).
The Google URL I was sharing was outdated anyway; It was pointing to the old Google Webmaster Central section at BlogSpot.com – that was changed years ago. A quick click on the old URL was enough as Google had 301’d the old link. I simply grabbed the new URL and switched them over.
The second external URL I had posted in 2010 was to a fellow SEO’s website. I clicked the new HTTPS link and…
It redirected to a completely different domain. The page was branded completely differently too. Where the original destination website was a personal website, the personality named and illustrated in the new website was not the same person!
The story I had first linked to fifteen years ago was gone as well. The original external post was about brand searches in Google SERPs performing like site: operators. The new, hijacked URL pointed to a post about brand vs non-brand keywords and strategies. Similar but not the same subject.
Now, this clever chap was not getting a direct link to his website as it was being 301’d to a new page on a new domain, but it still counts. Link juice, or Page Rank, flows from the original link to the destination page.
So I pasted the original link I still had in situ into Wayback Machine and saw what I would have seen 15 years back. I then posted the Wayback Machine’s archived link into my old blog post, giving the originator some credit. From the data in Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive the origin site had not seen much action in about 5 or 6 years, as in the screen shot below.
That was enough for me. I could have checked when the old domain expired, who purchased it and when it was acquired. I could also have investigated what content was up at the hijacked domain and for how long. But I had what I wanted – an archive link to a crawl of the original, keeping the context of my post correct.
The expired domain owner, running a legitimate UK SEO business, has now lost a link to his new website. Sorry dude.
What is Expired Domain Abuse?
Well that was a good example above. A dead link to a dead website and where the domain has not been renewed and is available for purchase, is the first opportunity for acquiring an expired domain. People have been buying up expired domains and reinstating the websites behind them.
Quite often these old domains still have some backlinks and that can be useful to effectively buy up the domain authority. All you have to do is recreate the old URLs and they will still have the other old inbound links and all of the Page Rank associated with them.
You can see that I’ve thought about it in the past too, right?
The thing with these expired domains is that once you’d brought the domain and recreated the URLs, you didn’t have to recreate the content as well. However, I have seen examples where the content has been copied like-for-like, yet at what benefit?
This is where the manipulation begins…
Once a new owner had the domain name and a rebuilt website, they could start linking to other websites in an attempt to create new backlink profile and game the system. After all, a website with more links from more domains is a popular resource, right? And if there’s a historic inbound link from a website with reasonable Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) then that link juice flows to the sites you’d pointed to.
However, this is no longer an SEO tactic.
Expired Domain Abuse is Web Spam
An old colleague of mine showed me a YouTube video about this grey hat SEO trick. Yes, it was clever, but it also involved risk. All grey hat SEO involves an element of risk. You can violate Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) and ultimately suffer the consequences such as de-indexing, and other penalties.
What was impressive was that the guys I saw conducting the expired domain abuse weren’t your usual spammers. By this I mean that the cheapest and easiest tactic was to create poor quality pages and fill them with links. Our guys were being a bit more sophisticated. Is ethical spamming a thing?
And the chap in my case who had effectively hijacked the link from my page had a bit of a hop in the middle – He didn’t recreate the old domain’s page when I spotted it – there was just a 301 redirect to a page about a very similar subject.
But obviously this level of malarkey was such that Google cracked down on it last year and of the three new types of web spam, expired domain abuse was one.
The others, including Scaled Content Abuse and Site Reputation Abuse were also on Google’s cull list in the March 2024 update. When my friend and (ex) colleague also pointed out this clampdown, I said “good”.
Whilst I admire SEO tricks, and I’d independently thought of legitimately using them myself, the level of expired domain abuse must have been such that this was not where I should have been going.
Those Other Banned SEO Tactics
Just as a reminder, these were the other types of abuse that Google cracked down in in its March 2024 update.
- Scaled Content Abuse: AI-generated poor-quality, unoriginal content produced at scale,
- Site Reputation Abuse: High quality reputable websites containing low-quality content from third-parties.
- Expired Domain Abuse: The purchasing of expired domains to create new content and try leverage historic Page Rank from Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA).
So with apologies to the SEO guy who hijacked the domain to which I was linking, my blog is accurate again, at least on one post that’s received 83 impressions and zero clicks in 12 months!
Take Away
If you’ve got an old website with historical external links, it’s worth conducting a website audit, specifically looking for those external links. So conduct a link audit of your website, more specifically, an external link audit.
A really useful tool for this is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Run a crawl and look for those:
- HTTP URLs. They’re outdated and should now be HTTPS
- HTTP status codes, particularly;
- 4xx, or 404 errors – these the “cannot be found” so you’ll need to fix these broken links.
- 3xx, or redirection: 302 are moved temporarily whilst 301 status codes indicate a link that has been redirected and “moved permanently”.
You’ll need to be methodical in clearing up any old links, and that’s the art of SEO – making sure everything is correct rather than just throwing it away. Ultimately it’s a business decision – what’s the benefit of keep and fixing content versus simply removing it?
The benefit may be maintaining a strong internal link structure (Menus etc.), preserving historical information, or even demonstrating your website’s longevity, evolution, and trust – good for E-E-A-T.
Actions
If you need a freelance SEO consultant to help with website audits, link audits and fixes, then call me on 01252 692 765 or leave me a message via my contact form.