Expired domain abuse is a spam policy codified by Google in March 2024 that targets the practice of purchasing previously authoritative expired domains and repurposing them to host low-quality or irrelevant content in order to inherit the domain’s historical link equity and rankings. The tactic has existed for many years — practitioners would acquire dropped domains with strong backlink profiles and quickly populate them with thin content designed to rank on the strength of inherited trust. Google’s formalisation of this as a named spam policy signalled that SpamBrain and manual review teams were being specifically trained to identify such behaviour. Penalties can include the loss of all ranking credit associated with the domain’s historical authority, effectively resetting it to the standing of a new domain. Legitimate repurposing of an expired domain with genuinely useful, on-topic content is not explicitly prohibited.