Below we will review the most important aspects of an Search Engine Optimization strategy called: Parasite SEO

What is Parasite SEO?

As the proper name says: Parasites are organisms that live in, on or with another organism (host). They feed, grow or multiply in a way that harms their host. However, they need their host for their survival. For this reason, they rarely kill their host, but they often carry diseases that can be life-threatening.

In a similar way, when we talk about Parasite SEO, we refer to an amount of content that is placed on a third party domain, to benefit from the domain Authority obtaining a much better Search Engine rankings performance than if that content was placed on a website with much lower authority.

It’s important that to be considered Parasite, the content has to be quite unrelated to the main website topicality. Otherwise, it would just be considered affiliation.

Example: I open a blog and publish an informational article about how to analyze markets, and place bets on Champions League matches. With probably very poor performance. But if I publish the same article in The New York Times, the performance on Google of that second article is gonna be much more successful.

Benefits of Parasite SEO

Normally when you create a website, you will need to show the search engines your Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness (Google´s EEAT). This requires time, and a lot of effort on resources for content creation, and link building.

But when placing your content on a website that already has a long history & Authority, you can manage to get results in record time.

What methods are there for implementing Parasite SEO?

  1. Guest Posting – One of the easiest methods is reaching an agreement with a High Authority website, you can give them your content, and pay them to publish it on their domain. This method is very similar to a very old Link-Building strategy, consisting on posting articles on third party websites, linking to your own website. But back then, The sole existence of the backlink was more important than the rankings of such article.
  2. Parasite Subfolder – This technique consists of agreeing economically with a third party website, to install an independent backend on a folder of root domain. This has been the revolution of Parasite SEO with huge success within the last 3-4 years.
  3. Expired Domains – Consisting on purchasing a domain with a good number of historical backlinks & authority, and placing your content on it.

Does Google like / accept Parasite SEO

No, obviously no, Parasite SEO is a trick SEOs developed to beat the Google Algorithm, which in fact, even though its current popularity, Still Google didn’t find the solution to prevent PArasite SEO with their Algorithm

Is Parasite SEO a strategy for the future?

No, not at least in the long term, Google already introduced in May 2024 their “Site Reputation Abuse” policy. But this is not implemented within their algorithm. It requires Google’s manual checkers to identify these strategies. And if their investigation considers the site can be subject to a penalty, then Google wil deIndex most of those pages. This means, that once a website is reported, there will be analysts considering if it’s a situation where a manual penalty can be put in place.

Because of this, a Parasite website may probably have a few months of success, until it can be penalized.

It’s also true that Google has been accelerating their process on these reviews, so probably within time, the life of these type of websites will be shorter and shorter, but if revenue within that time, is higher than expenses, there will still be people executing these strategies.

Are these penalties definite?

  • No, first of all, because if you adjust your website to Google Guidelines, you can always lift any type of penalty.
  • Second, because you can claim to Google. In some cases its very difficult to draw a red line to define if a content on a website is really unrelated to the main topic of the website.

For example:

  • A website talking about traveling, building content about Cruise Lines seems like something logical.
  • New York TImes talking about Sports Betting websites, seems very unrelated. So it could be subject to a penalty.
  • But how about a Sports Live Score website, giving advice on best odds or recommended Sportsbooks?
  • Or the previous travelling website giving advice about which Casinos to visit when traveling Las Vegas or Macao?
  • Or a crypto website recommending a number of websites where you can make purchases with cryptocurrencies?

The thing is, in some cases it is very difficult to draw a red line, and in my opinion those cases still have a future in Parasite SEO.

Is Parasite SEO legal?

Well, there is not a global regulation about the internet content (even for very clear cases like underaged pornography). So in this case we need to review in each case, the regulation on each country, Governments like Australians, may ban pages, and even the whole domain, if they breach their regulations for example related to gambling, but others may not have a defined regulation, so there is somehow a legal loophole, meaning its totally legal.

What risks can an authority website have, when agreeing to do Parasite SEO?

As we mentioned previously, the risks for a website, accepting to post third party content are three:

  1. Google could penalise the whole domain.
  2. Websites can be blocked in a specific country if the content published by the third party breaches the country regulations.
  3. In a similar way as the last one, websites could even suffer legal consequences for providing restricted content to the residents in a given country.

Therefore it’s very important that a website with a good authority, considers what kind of content could be published by a third party on their website, and define in a contract, topicalities, limits, and geo-targeting.

Pros & Cons of Parasite SEO

Conclusions about Parasite SEO

So overall I don’t see a bright long term future to building a Parasite web that takes advantage of the host site. But instead, I have in mind a new concept, I decided to call symbiotic SEO, (Symbiosis stands for “interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both.” ) in which two entities benefit from mutual collaboration, in the long term.