Google's Link Spam Policy: What Counts and What Doesn't

Google defines link spam as "the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings", then lists eleven examples. Buying links is on the list. Automated link creation is on the list. Requiring a link in a contract is on the list. A link that somebody else placed on their own site years before you owned the domain is not on the list, because you did not create it. That distinction is the entire legal basis for buying an expired domain for its links, and it also sets the limit: it protects the inheritance, not what you do afterwards. Quoted from Google's spam policies, read on 16 September 2026.

What does Google count as link spam?

Link spam is the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings. The following are examples of link spam:

• Buying or selling links for ranking purposes. This includes:
  • Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links
  • Exchanging goods or services for links
  • Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
• Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site
• Requiring a link as part of a Terms of Service, contract, or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link
• Text advertisements or text links that don't block ranking credit
• Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites
• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links
• Keyword-rich, hidden, or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites
• Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites
• Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature
• Creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals

Every item on that list is something the site owner does. The verb in the definition is "creating".

What does Google say is fine?

The paragraph that closes the section, which gets quoted far less often than the list:

Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value to the <a> tag.

So paid links are not prohibited. Paid links that pass ranking credit are. The fix Google names is an attribute, not removal. Our guide to dofollow and nofollow links covers what each value means and how a search engine treats it.

Where do inherited expired-domain links sit?

Outside the policy as written, with one honest caveat.

Nothing on the list describes receiving a link. A university that cited a research page in 2014, a forum thread that linked a tool in 2011, an encyclopaedia reference added by a volunteer: none of those were created by whoever owns the domain today. The policy has no clause about links that came with a name, and Google has never published one. John Mueller was asked in 2020 whether Google resets the backlinks of an expired domain and did not answer that part. Nobody at Google has since.

The caveat is that inheriting a link and benefiting from it are different questions. The links stay live for as long as the linking pages do, and they resolve to whatever is at the domain now. Whether they carry weight depends on the subject matching, and that is the expired domain abuse test rather than a link spam test.

Two ways an expired-domain project does land in link spam territory:

You build a network. Registering a batch of aged domains and cross-linking them to a main site is "using automated programs or services to create links", "widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites", or both. This is the practice private blog networks are, and we cover why it fails in PBNs and expired domains.

You buy placements on the domain's strength. Selling links from an aged domain you own is "buying or selling links for ranking purposes" from the other side of the transaction. The policy names both directions: "to or from a site".

What about the links you already have?

Google's position is that most sites should do nothing. From the disavow documentation:

In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most sites will not need to use this tool.

You should disavow backlinks only if:

• You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, AND
• The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.

Both conditions, not either. The same page calls the tool "an advanced feature" that "can potentially harm your site's performance in Google Search results" if used incorrectly. Our guide to toxic backlinks and disavow goes through when the second condition is actually met.

How honest link data changes the decision

One thing worth saying about our own numbers, because it cuts against the pitch. Most of what the directory surfaces as a marquee reference is a nofollow link. Community platforms and encyclopaedias almost universally qualify their outbound links, and the two largest sources in our book are exactly that: 6,063 of the 12,137 live listings carry a reference from Hacker News and 5,141 from Wikipedia. Plan on those passing no ranking signal at all.

What they are good for is different. They are evidence a real site existed, that people found it worth citing, and that the pages holding the references are the kind of pages retrieval systems read. The links most likely to carry ranking weight in a listing are the ordinary editorial ones from trade sites and university pages, which are rarer. The Linked by column shows you which you are looking at before you spend anything.

Using the Revised directory for this

1. Open the directory and sort or filter on the referring-domain band. The distribution is narrow: 9,113 of 12,137 listings sit in the 10 to 50 band, 1,402 in 50 to 100, 537 in 100 to 250 and only 58 above that. Treat a very high count as a reason to look harder, not as a score.
2. Read the Linked by column before the count. Who references a domain answers more than how many do.
3. Start from a source hub when the link type matters. Domains with .edu backlinks and .gov backlinks are the two reference types you cannot buy, which is why they are also the two the link spam policy can never reach.
4. Verify a shortlisted name with the backlink checker, which lists the source page, anchor text and link type per referring domain, then open several of the linking pages. A profile that is mostly forum signatures is a profile Google has been told to discount.
5. Check the current status and site history with the expired domain checker before you register anything.

Every listing is spam-screened before it goes up. Right now 10,318 of the live listings sit in the low band and 1,819 in the moderate one, and 78 domains are blocked outright.

FAQ

Is buying expired domains for backlinks link spam? Not under the policy as written. Link spam is about creating links. Links that already existed when you registered the name were created by other people on their own sites. What you publish on the domain is judged under expired domain abuse instead.

Is buying links against Google's policy? Buying links that pass ranking credit is. Google says buying and selling links is "a normal part of the economy of the web" and is not a violation when the links carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".

Does Google penalise nofollow links pointing at my site? No. The policy is about links that pass ranking credit. A qualified link is the remedy Google names, not the offence.

Are PBNs against Google's policies? Yes, on more than one count. Cross-linked networks of owned domains are covered by the examples on automated link creation and site-wide template links, and the sites in them usually fail the scaled content and expired domain abuse policies too.

Should I disavow links I inherited with an expired domain? Only if you have both a considerable volume of spammy links and a manual action, or a clear expectation of one. Google's own guidance is that most sites never need the tool, and that using it wrongly can hurt.

Does Google count all links equally? No, and it has never published how it weighs them. The only public facts are the attribute values, where Google said in 2019 that sponsored, ugc and nofollow are "treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search".