Black Hat

Link Laundering / Expired Domain Acquisition

Acquire an aged domain with backlinks and inherit its authority via 301s.

Works briefly. Then Google's link spam updates and manual review team catch up. The 'right' version — buying a real publication and continuing to operate it — is fine. The doorway version (301 a defunct blog straight to product pages) gets nuked.

Seen in the wild

The Expired Domain 301 Trick

9.0

A supplement brand acquired a defunct health blog with 15 years of backlinks and 301'd it into their money pages. Then Google noticed.

Related plays

Parasite SEO — Rank on someone else's domain — Reddit, Medium, LinkedIn, Forbes — instead of building your own authority.