A new Backlinking.com study found that more than 12% of the high-value expired domains it examined ended up carrying gambling or betting content after being sold, including web addresses once used by charities, political campaigns, and government-backed projects. The SEO research publication looked at 3,692 domains that sold for at least $3,000 between January 2024 and May 2026, and initially classified 448 of them, or 12.1%, as gambling-related after the sale.
The $22.3 million figure in the study is what all 3,692 domains in the sample sold for combined, not what buyers paid for the 448 that later hosted gambling content. Backlinking.com matched public auction records against live websites, redirects, and archived pages to track what happened to each domain after the sale, leaving any whose new use couldn’t be established unclassified. Since the sample only covers comparatively expensive auction sales, the 12.1% shouldn’t be read as representative of every expired domain sold or re-registered during the period.
EveryWomanEveryChild.org, which belonged to the United Nations-backed global health initiative, is among the examples with no prior connection to gambling at all. It sold for $25,500 at a GoDaddy auction in October 2025, a price independent domain-sale records confirm, and was later found redirecting to an Indonesian-facing gaming site, with more recent web data also picking up gambling-related content and redirects on it.
VoteLeaveTakeControl.org, the domain of the official Vote Leave campaign in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum, went for $46,001 in November 2025, a sale domain-market trackers have also recorded. Backlinking.com found it was later used for a page promoting online casinos outside GamStop, and separate website records have since shown the domain carrying a title advertising “Non GamStop Casinos.”
VulvalPainSociety.org shows how an organisation’s old address can keep its commercial value after the organisation moves on. The UK charity’s former domain sold for $32,001 in September 2025, shortly before the charity told users its website had moved to VulvalPainSociety.org.uk. The old .org now presents itself as a US betting affiliate site covering Texas sportsbooks and offshore betting operators, and its own terms say it can earn commissions from sportsbook referrals.
.org domains and pricier purchases showed a noticeably higher rate of gambling use. Of the 701 .org addresses in the study, 127, or 18.1%, became gambling sites, compared with 292 of 2,745 .com domains, or 10.6%, and at least one in five domains that sold for $25,000 or more later carried gambling content. The study also identified 746 auctioned domains with at least one backlink from a government website, 125 of which were later classified as gambling-related.
Existing links like those are part of what makes expired domains valuable to new owners, since a charity, government body, or established campaign may have built up links from trusted websites over years, and those links often stay online after the domain changes hands. Google classifies buying an expired domain mainly to exploit its previous reputation and manipulate search rankings as “expired domain abuse,” with its own examples including casino content placed on a former school domain and affiliate content on a former government site. Sites that break those spam policies can lose search visibility.
Backlinking.com repeated its checks 30 days later and found 865 domains had changed outcome, with 170 becoming gambling pages and 133 previously classified as gambling-related no longer meeting the definition. That pushed the gambling total from 448 to 485, about 13.1% of the original 3,692-domain sample, and shows how much a single crawl misses when domains are constantly being redirected, parked, rebuilt, or resold.
The study doesn’t identify the buyers behind every domain or show that all of them were bought specifically for their backlink profiles, and gambling-related use ranges from direct redirects to casino brands through to affiliate and comparison sites. What it does document is a sizeable market in expired web addresses with established histories, including domains still linked from public bodies long after their original owners left them behind. In several cases, someone clicking an old charity, government, or campaign link can now land on gambling content run by an unrelated owner.