Links On Expired Domains

[AAttias]

Does anybody know if a link on an expired domain affects your SEO?

I'm just asking because the SEO agency we used before used to create websites and then link to our company - very spammy.

We have since ditched this agecny, however they wanted an extortionate amount to remove these links. Therefore, we decided to wait until these domains expired and then the links wouldn't exist.

However, I am now completing a link audit and some of these sites are still appearing in the results (obtained from Link Research Tools) but I cannot access the links because the domains have expired.

Can anyone help?

[LesleyPaone]

If all of the domains are not expired you can use the disavow tool as well. That should be your first course in a situation like this, especially when someone is trying to extort you of bad links. If you disavow them, google does not penalize you for them and drops them out of your backlink profile.

[TomRayner]

Hi Brian

If the domain has expired, it should only be a matter of time before Google recrawls the page/domain and sees that the link is no longer present, therefore discounting the link from your link profile.

You could have a look and see if this has happened by typing into your address bar (if using Chrome) either:

cache:example.com
site:example.com

The first one will check to see if the URL is cached and the second one if it is indexed.  If a cached version of the page no longer exists, the link has almost certainly been discounted, whereas if the domain is no longer indexed it would be safe to assume that the link will be discounted soon by Google as well.

I hope this helps - sorry to hear of your previous agency resorting to such backhanded tactics.