Responding to Expired Domain Abuse – When Someone Misuses My Old Domain

My old blog used to be fecu.tistory.com on Tistory.

But after deciding to create a Next.js blog, I deleted all the posts on Tistory and even deleted the Tistory blog itself.

That was my biggest mistake.

1. Someone opened a blog with the exact same domain as mine...?

At first, a lot of people were visiting my new blog.

So I never even thought about looking for my previous blog.

But at some point, I suddenly hit a search cliff.

Even posts that had been ranking started disappearing from search.

While investigating, I discovered that someone had opened a blog using my old domain.

And all the posts were written using AI, with ads plastered all over the place.

A Warm Interview

This is fecu’s blog.

fecu.tistory.com

If it hadn’t affected my blog, I might have just ignored it, but ever since this blog was created, Google seems to have started judging my blog as a low-quality blog.

At first, I didn’t take any action.

I vaguely believed that sooner or later Google would recognize my blog.

But after about six months, my patience ran out.

2. What is Expired Domain Abuse?

Expired domain abuse is when someone buys an abandoned domain and uses the domain’s existing credibility to make money.

A domain is not just a simple address.

Over time, assets like the following accumulate:

• Search engine trust (Domain Authority)

• Backlinks (links from external sites)

• Search visibility history of past content

All of these are important criteria search engines use to evaluate a site.

3. How is it abused?

There are people who specifically target expired domains.

They automatically purchase them the moment they’re released, which is called drop catching.

After that, they use them in ways like these:

1. Completely switch to different content. They mass-upload AI-generated posts, or add ads, affiliate marketing, or connect to gambling sites.

2. Imitate the original topic. For example, if it used to be an education blog, they keep it looking like an education site, but the actual content is completely different. This is a tactic to trick search engines.

3. Insert monetization link structures. This generates revenue through clicks and impressions.

The core of expired domain abuse is not simple reuse, but inheriting the ‘trust’ built up by the original owner as-is.

In other words, it’s closer to stealing search engine trust than stealing content.

If you look at the posts of the person who created a Tistory blog under my old ID, you can see that everything is covered with AI content and ads, like this.

You can use the checklist below to decide whether what you’re seeing is expired domain abuse.

In my case, all of them applied.

- The old domain’s content has completely changed (O)
- The posts strongly feel AI-generated (O)
- There are many ads or external links (O)
- Some of the old post structure is being kept (O)
- It is still appearing in search results (O)

4. How to respond

In Naver or Daum, my blog was still showing well in search results, so that wasn’t a big problem.

Still, I decided to fix Google first.

1) Reporting expired domain abuse to Google

Google does not like expired domain abuse.

So it might be a problem that can be resolved by reporting it.

First, go to the address below.

Then enter the page URL --> click “Page involved in spam activity”.

Click Next, then select expired domain abuse.

In the additional details section, I wrote up the situation in Korean, translated it into English with AI, and submitted it.

After you submit the report, you can confirm via email that the report has been submitted.

2) Reporting expired domain abuse to Naver

Naver does not have a separate process specifically for expired domain abuse reports.

The only way is to report it to the Rights Protection Center.

But even that is difficult to do unless the content was directly created within a Naver service.

Since I still get steady traffic from Naver anyway, I decided to just leave it.

Rights Protection Center

We provide a variety of services to protect the rights of Naver users.

right.naver.com

3) Removing backlinks

I searched for posts that referenced fecu.tistory.com, whether they were citing my old blog or were written in comments, and edited them.

It’s a bit of a hassle, but I decided to willingly put up with it for the sake of my blog.

5. Afterthoughts

My old blog used to get about 300 visitors a day at minimum, and up to around 500 on a good day.

And although not many people used it, I had created and distributed something called the Kangaroo Skin.

Since someone just deleted and abandoned such a blog domain, it’s only natural that it caught someone’s eye.

I’ve been running a blog for six years now, and I think this is the first time I’ve taken such a big hit.

I couldn’t tolerate this kind of abuse anymore, so I decided to file a report.

All that’s left now is to wait and find a way to prove that this blog originally belonged to me, and that all the posts I publish are originally mine.

At first I considered abandoning earthscience.kr and moving to another domain, but I haven’t done anything wrong.

For the time being, I’m going to keep fighting like this.