Buying a Spam Domain

September 28 2026With the prevalence of advertising on the internet, it's not hard to imagine that ads are one of the primary reasons the internet became as big as it did. The creation of ad services allowed webmasters to turn their hobbies into businesses, incentivizing millions to create internet content with the hope of capturing some juicy revenue. Unfortunately, this powerful force also spawned several darker sides of the internet.Scammers and spammers have hitched rides on the back of internet advertising, whether those are legitimate ad platforms hosting unmoderated links or sketchy websites hosting scam links. Internet crime is so common that Americans alone lost $148 billion to online scams in 2025, according to Consumer Federation of America, up more than 25% over the previous year.In fact, the very domain you're reading this on, cam-davis.com, was previously a scam domain. I just happened upon the evidence for it recently while putting my website on Google Search.While submitting my real sitemap, Google showed pages upon pages of bogus submissions I never created pre-loaded in the search console. This felt really strange because I assumed the domain would be a blank canvas when transferred to my Google account.Unfortunately, I didn't save a screenshot of these sitemaps, but I do have some of the remaining pages Google is still attempting to index.

Google index attempts for bogus vulgar links and the location where I used to keep my resume. Interestingly, Google says it crawled these links in 2026 and they returned 404, yet Google continued to index them.

The above links capture keywords that people may be searching for on the dark side of the internet. Users that search for this kind of content are more likely to click sketchy links to locate it. I find it unlikely that my domain was actually used to host the 17 thousand links that were indexed by Google. Instead, I assume it was an SEO abuse operation designed to get clicks and redirect to ads.The cause was likely a lapse in domain ownership under a previous webmaster. I believe they forgot to renew the domain, or neglected it, while it still had a search presence. Scammers recognized this gap in ownership and snagged the domain so they can create a massive amount of spam links. Instead of starting with a fresh domain that draws more scrutiny, they start with a domain that has already existed within Google's system. Then, they can capture clicks and 301 to nefarious places (301 redirects may explain the lack of Internet Archive entries).My ownership of the domain has been unbroken since 2024, and both google verification tokens in my DNS are owned by me. Assuming there was no breach of my Google account, my explanation above is the only believable one.

Cleanup

After claiming the website via DNS records, Google was showing over 1000 bogus sitemaps. If I wanted my website to show in search results, I was going to have to clean up the sitemaps. I drafted up a python script to remove all sitemaps.

from google_auth_oauthlib.flow import InstalledAppFlow
from googleapiclient.discovery import build

SECRET_FILE = "replace-me"
DOMAIN = "cam-davis.com"

SCOPES = ["https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters"]
flow = InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file(SECRET_FILE, SCOPES)
creds = flow.run_local_server(port = 0)

svc = build("searchconsole", "v1", credentials = creds)
SITE = f"sc-domain:{DOMAIN}"
KEEP = f"https://{DOMAIN}/sitemap.xml"

while True:
  sitemaps = svc.sitemaps().list(siteUrl = SITE).execute().get("sitemap", [])
  print(f"{len(sitemaps)} sitemaps found.")
  if len(sitemaps) == 0:
    break
  for sm in sitemaps:
    if sm["path"] != KEEP:
      svc.sitemaps().delete(siteUrl = SITE, feedpath = sm["path"]).execute()
      print("Deleted", sm["path"])

Results

This script was successful in deleting all sitemaps except the legitimate one. Unfortunately, this hasn't been the end of my troubles. Google Search is a massive, distributed system, and changes take a while to propogate.The first screenshot was actually taken today, while Google is still attempting to index pages that return 404 and haven't existed for several years. Also, my legitimate pages, including this blog, are still unindexed for unspecified reasons.

Google webmaster dashboard showing several index attempts for pages that don't exist, while all real pages are 'Discovered - currently not indexed'.

It's unclear how long it will take before my website is properly indexed or whether there is anything further I can do about this. If you found this post from Google, consider the problem solved.