ELMIRA, California, Oct. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Backlinking.com, an independent research publication about backlinks and SEO, today published an audit of 3,692 expired domains that sold at auction for $3,000 or more between January 2024 and May 2026. Buyers paid $22.3 million for them. The audit recorded what each new owner did with the domain. 448 of the domains, 12.1 percent, were rebuilt as gambling or betting sites.
Many of the audited domains once belonged to charities, public campaigns, and government-backed bodies. Those organizations do not own the domains today. Each domain sold at auction after its registration ended, and the new owners have no connection to the groups that built the old sites.
From the published case studies:
- Every Woman Every Child was a global health movement launched in 2010 under the United Nations Secretary-General. Its domain sold for $25,500 in October 2025. It now forwards to a host titled with the name of an Indonesian online casino.
- Vote Leave was the designated campaign to leave the European Union in the 2016 UK referendum. Its domain sold for $46,001 in November 2025. Seven weeks later, the archived homepage was a list of casinos for UK players outside the GamStop self-exclusion scheme.
- The Queen’s Green Canopy was the tree-planting campaign for the 2022 Platinum Jubilee. Its domain sold for $34,001 in July 2025. It stayed unchanged for about a year, then began forwarding to an Indonesian online slot page.
- The Midlands Engine was a government-backed growth partnership with links from 48 government websites. Its domain sold for $36,500 in November 2025. Six weeks later, the archived homepage was a casino page for UK players outside GamStop.
- The Vulval Pain Society was a UK medical charity. Its domain sold for $32,001 in September 2025 and now serves a guide to offshore sportsbooks for bettors in Texas.
These buyers pay for the links. Other websites, including government sites, linked to these domains for years, and those links stay in place after a domain changes hands. Google’s spam policies name this practice “expired domain abuse,” and one of the policy’s own examples is “casino-related content on a former elementary school site.”
Higher prices went with more gambling use. About one in ten domains that sold for under $5,000 became a gambling site. From $25,000 up, the rate was one in five or higher. The .org domains, the ending most charities and campaigns use, became gambling sites at 18.1 percent (127 of 701). For .com the rate was 10.6 percent (292 of 2,745). When they sold, 746 of the domains had at least one link from a government website. 125 of those are now gambling sites.
The count is still moving. A second check 30 days later found 865 of the 3,692 domains with a different outcome. In that month 170 became gambling pages and 133 stopped, which raised the total from 448 to 485.
“When a charity or campaign domain expires, the links that other websites gave it do not expire with it,” said Aaron Seminoff, who runs Backlinking.com. “Those links are what these buyers pay for. We record the evidence behind every outcome, and if anyone thinks a record is wrong, we will audit it again.”
Sale prices and dates come from public auction results. Each outcome comes from the live site, its redirects, and archived copies. When the evidence was not clear, the record says unknown. The full results and case studies are in the Backlinking.com Expired Domain Report.
About Backlinking.com
Backlinking.com is an independent research publication about backlinks and SEO. It publishes audited records of what happens to expired domains after auction, and price data on links. It is run by Aaron Seminoff, who has worked in SEO for more than 15 years.
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