Thanks, EGOL, for your advice.  Yes, I will follow it (i.e., spend time on creating the best site I could).  On thing, though:

"Is expired domains against Google's webmaster guidelines?  I don't think that it is."

Well, Google has punished private blog networks on the past, and this site is sorta like a PBN except it's only one site.  However, like a PBN, it took an expired domain's backlinks and redirected to itself (i.e., it uses another site's backlinks--the previous thegunzone's backlinks--for itself).  The two incarnations of the site are totally different.  This is what irritated me.  The guy didn't at all earn those backlinks, esp. since almost all of them go to articles that don't exist anymore (but are redirected to the homepage).

Oh, well, whatever.  I'll follow your advice.  Thanks!

Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)?

The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com.  It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links.  It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/

Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer:

http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/

It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks.  However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links.  Here's an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling

At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage.  Again, the site's totally different.   And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too).

My question is this:  this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right?  Is this prevalent on the internet?  Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet?  And how do I report him?   I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords.  (Disclosure:  I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.)

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.