Do Expired Domains Still Work for SEO

Buying an expired domain and redirecting it to your own site used to be a common way to inherit someone else’s backlinks. We tested it ourselves in 2020 and published the results. Google closed the ambiguity in March 2024, and we no longer use the tactic in client campaigns. This article explains what expired domains are, what our test actually showed, what changed, and what we do instead.

What are expired domains?

Expired domains are the domain names of websites that have gone defunct. Over its life a site accumulates links from other websites. When the business closes or the registration lapses, the domain becomes available to buy – and whoever buys it inherits the inbound links pointing at it.

That is the entire appeal. The buyer is not purchasing a website. They are purchasing a link profile that somebody else earned, and hoping Google keeps counting it after the domain changes hands and changes purpose.

What our 2020 test showed

We ran a controlled experiment in 2020 to find out whether the tactic worked. We are leaving the results here because they were real and we published them at the time – but read them as a record of what Google did five years ago, not as a recommendation.

We bought a domain whose name closely matched a test site we had built – the domain had a word like “plumbing” in it, and the target site was about plumbing. That meant most of the existing anchor text pointing at the old domain carried the keyword too.

The domain was weak on purpose

It had only nine referring domains. Only five of those were dofollow, and the strongest had an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 26 out of 100.

We kept it deliberately thin so that other factors would not muddy the result. The target site was a few months old, had placeholder content, and earned no other links during the test. We changed nothing else on it for roughly 45 days – no content refresh, no title or description edits.

What happened

Over about two months the target rose from beyond position 100 to position 15 for the term we were tracking.

Two honest caveats, both of which we noted at the time. Position 15 is not page one, and the site did not get further without real content – the gains after the first 45 days came from improving the page, not from the redirect. And a single test on a single term is an anecdote, not evidence of a durable ranking factor. Google’s John Mueller said repeatedly that redirected expired domains do not pass value. Our result did not disprove him; it showed a short-lived lift on a site with nothing else going for it.

What changed in 2024

On 5 March 2024 Google added expired domain abuse to its spam policies and began enforcing it that week, through both algorithmic systems and manual actions. Google’s definition:

Expired domain abuse is where an expired domain name is purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users.

Read that carefully, because the line it draws is narrower than most summaries suggest. Google is explicit that buying an old domain to build a genuine new site is fine. What the policy targets is buying a domain primarily to manipulate rankings.

The same spam policies separately list “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as link spam. And that is the honest problem with the tactic as it is usually practised: when the only reason to buy a domain is the link profile attached to it, you have bought links. The redirect is a delivery mechanism, not a defence.

Why we stopped using expired domains

We retired the tactic. Four reasons, in order of how much they weigh:

• It conflicts with what we tell clients we do. Our ethics and standards commit us to working within platform rules rather than around them. A tactic whose value depends on Google not noticing that a domain changed hands and purpose does not survive that test.
• The policy is no longer ambiguous. Before March 2024 this sat in a grey area. It does not any more.
• The upside was always small and temporary. Our own test is the argument against it: a modest lift to position 15, on a site with no content, that went no further until we wrote something worth reading.
• The downside lands on the client. A manual action or an algorithmic demotion attaches to the client’s property, not to the agency that recommended the shortcut. That asymmetry alone should settle it.

What we do instead

Nothing here is a secret, and none of it is fast. Durable search results come from owning more of the first page with material that deserves to be there:

• Publish content that earns its ranking. Substantive pages on properties you control, built to answer the questions people actually search – the approach we describe in SEO for reputation management.
• Strengthen the properties you already own. Executive bios, company pages, profiles and social accounts you control are usually under-optimised, and improving them carries no policy risk at all.
• Earn links rather than buy them. Slower, and the only kind that holds up when the algorithm changes.
• Use search result suppression where content cannot be removed. Promoting accurate, authoritative material so damaging pages move down – which is the legitimate version of what expired domains were being used to shortcut.

A note on legitimate 301 redirects

None of this makes redirects suspect. Redirecting a domain you own to a domain you own is ordinary web maintenance. We did it ourselves years ago when we changed our name from Internet Reputation Management to Reputation X, so that links to the old address kept working.

The difference is intent and continuity. Moving your own site to a new address preserves something real for the people who follow those links. Buying a stranger’s lapsed domain to harvest its link equity does not.