7 ms·

Parasite SEO

sdan 7y ago
As this post says, Google is taking action against this blackhat method of SEO. Several people have tried to rank as #1 using s3, but Google's ranking algorithm eventually pulls or removes the content from being listed entirely. We're talking about Google here, I'm pretty sure they're aware of this type of SEO hacking.
- Matsta 7y ago
  The Google algo still loves PDF's. They will review individual URL's if they receive a DMCA, but after looking at Ahref's, I can see the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" PDF (Which I'm guessing can't be legally distributed by the person who uploaded) has been live since July 2018 and is still ranking in Google: https://i.imgur.com/Mp7prUn.png https://i.imgur.com/Mp7prUn.png
dazc 7y ago
'Google Issues Warning About Leasing Subdomains Or Subfolder' https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-leasing-subdomains-or-subfolders-28059.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-leasing-subd...
- beobab 7y ago
  I like the line in that article which said that they wrote about it "1.5 months ago". It's an oddly precise measurement with an imprecise unit.
- spiderfarmer 7y ago
  That tweet is in the article.
martin-adams 7y ago
I’ve seen this type of links against s clients domain which wasn’t initiated by the client. We can only think it’s a negative SEO attack, but honest have no idea what the motive behind it is.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Boosting some competitor if you fall?
  - martin-adams 7y ago
    That's the only reasonable conclusion we could come up with.
3xblah 7y ago
Imagine if the "trusted domain" used for the whitelabel site on a subdomain was google.com. Constantly referring to "Google's algorithm" misses the real issue. Google can do whatever it wants. Google can "trust" anyone or no one but itself. Google has all the traffic, not the coupon websites. Do we need laws that govern such middlemen?
- fasicle 7y ago
  "Google can do whatever it wants" - wouldn't this be anti-competitive behaviour if they stated favouring certain sites in their algorithm? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they get audited to make sure they don't do this, although can't find the link.
  - kadoban 7y ago
    I would think they're perfectly allowed to favor certain sites over others, especially with good reasons for doing so. What I would expect to be illegal would be overly favoring their own sites/services over those of competitors, since they are so big and that would be abusing their search marketshare to spread into other markets.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > What I would expect to be illegal would be overly favoring their own sites/services over those of competitors They've been doing this for years in search results, progressively so.
      - kadoban 7y ago
        Didn't the EU get on them for that and they had to pay a large fine? Can't recall the details of what was the offending behavior.
        ceejayoz 7y ago
        Yes, but specifically for their shopping product. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024... The practice continues (and continues to worsen), at least in their US version. I can't speak for their European sites.
luckylion 7y ago
Let's be clear here: the content doesn't rank because it's on a subdomain or folder of the strong domain, it ranks because it's there AND gets lots of links from most/all pages of that strong domain. The links are the relevant part, you'd have similar (albeit not as strong) results if you had site-wide links from top domains to your separate domain. Google already has a rule to deal with this: buying and selling links (and, by extension, renting links) is against their guidelines. They just don't enforce it for big publishing companies.
- ackbar03 7y ago
  From the medium article they link they show that most of the visits come from search though
  - ksahin 7y ago
    OP does not say the traffic comes from the links, he said the internal links make the site rank, not the fact that it’s on a high da subdomain/subfolder.
jwilk 7y ago
What does "DA" stand for?
- iamben 7y ago
  Domain Authority
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Which is an inhouse metric that one of the Major seo tool makers invented to try and measure the authority of a domain - its not a google metric.
    - Matsta 7y ago
      It's Moz's Metric. Majestic has their own metric (TF/CF Trust Flow and Citation Flow) and Ahrefs (UR/DR URL Rating and Domain Rating). I would say Ahrefs's is marginally more accurate then the others but to be honest any of these numbers can be gamed and are not a accurate representation of a domain and/or backlink.
- fasicle 7y ago
  Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
  - rsync 7y ago
    "You can view a website's DA by using MozBar (a free Chrome-extension), Link Explorer (a backlink analysis tool), the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer, and dozens of other SEO tools across the web." Why wouldn't I just type in the domain at moz.com and look it up there ? </retorical> [1] https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
auslander 7y ago
World needs a Coupon Stock Exchange, like NYSE. Then bundle fake coupons into CDOs.
butler14 7y ago
Ahhh affiliate marketing, still trucking along, still the lowest form of digital marketing Though influencer marketing has been having a good shot at that title in this past 5 years
- jwc1 7y ago
  I find a decent percentage of influencer marketing is still just affiliate marketing with a slightly different delivery channel.
derpherpsson 7y ago
It took a couple of paragraphs for me to realize what the article was about. I thought it was "Parasite CEO", that the boss is doing nothing while also stealing company resources.. arguably a somewhat common phenomena. But it's about Parasitic Search Enginge Optimizations.
- forgotpwd16 7y ago
  I thought the same. A parasite boss may be a common phenomenon but searching didn't bring up any interesting articles.
Yuval_Halevi 7y ago
In the next 1-3 years I'm sure Google will update their algorithm against these such of strategies
paulpauper 7y ago
this is not 2007 anymore.Google changed algos considerably over the past decade to make this much less effective.
forgotpwd16 7y ago
Interestingly, most of example sites given were launched within the recent year.
paulpauper 7y ago
This article is wrong on many levels. no wonder so many ppl try this and make no money. >You find a high DA site that allows user generated content to be added and indexed. (the host) >Common parasites include Medium, Amazon s3, Github, Linkedin, Quora, Youtube, ect. Google rank does not apply to subdomains. The subdomain does not inherit any of the rank of the parent. That is why blogspot and s3 will never work in this regard. Parasite SEO boost only works if the link passes ranking, the page itself has a lot of SEO authority, and there are not too many outgoing links. Medium will not work for this reason unless you get your link on a very high ranking medium page. Just posting your link on a new medium blog is useless. Same for Github, Quora, Youtube, linkedin for these reasons.
- Matsta 7y ago
  Hmm that's not 100% correct. Google still does apply this to some domains. Blogspot is a good example of this. and the s3.amazonaws.com is the same domain for EVERY bucket, so it definitely has link authority. The thing the article missed is that most of these medium/s3/blogspot parasites are a few years old. While a year ago you could chuck up a Medium blog and rank it in under a month, with the most recent Google update, it takes a lot longer to see things ranking. However yesterday I saw an exception to this, as this Medium account ranked in literally 2 days without any backlinks (the page has since been deleted): https://i.imgur.com/8lPHUYs.png https://i.imgur.com/8lPHUYs.png Parasites do work well, you just need to find the right 'secret sauce'. Some people can still spam 1000's of backlinks using Xrumer and/or GSA or slowly drip feed cheap PBN links. The article shows looking for keywords such as 'HostGator coupon' or 'Clash of Clans hack' and you'll see that the top 10 results literally change on a daily basis. People are doing of lot 301 redirects (buy a expired domains with lots of high authority backlinks and 301 it to your URL) and then block the bots for SEO tools like Ahrefs/Majestic/SEMRush etc. so other SEO's can't find their backlinks.
- degenerate 7y ago
  They are not using the host for link juice, they are using the host for lead-gen. Their PDF document in S3 links to their low-ranking spammy site, but the PDF itself ranks high. Same for medium posts, github pages, quora questions, etc. Search google for "biology 10th edition free pdf" and see what I mean. Some top-ranking hosts are: Quora, Pinterest, and DailyMotion. The parasites are the videos/PDFs/questions/images (user generated content) that link to the low-rank spam site. In some cases like Quora, the link juice is there, because it's not on a subdomain. For subdomains like S3, it's about the traffic/lead-gen, not the pagerank.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
Is it really "parasite SEO" if CNN decides to use their domain name clout with Google to make a (substantial) profit promoting coupons? Seems like more of a savvy business move on behalf of CNN instead of scummy/greyhat/parasite-seo type stuff, no? It's right up their alley, too. They sell advertisements. Coupons are advertisements.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Is it really "parasite SEO" if CNN decides to use their domain name clout with Google to make a (substantial) profit promoting coupons? CNN doesn't. Somebody else "rents" the subdomain from CNN, and they are the parasite that is feeding off of CNN's brand.
  - rcarrigan87 7y ago
    It's usually a 50-50 rev share
linuxhansl 7y ago
I have a personal blog and about 80-90% of all comments to my posts are these. In the beginning I just deleted them when I saw them, but then I had to turn on moderation.
- rchaud 7y ago
  People often point to social media as to why personal blogs died off, but I'd wager comment spam had just as much of an impact. Blogs were huge just 10 years ago, but eventually the sheer volume of spam comments with links to "Air Jordan, Gucci, Givenchy, work from home", really took out the communal feel of the comments section. Wordpress and Disqus didn't act fast enough to auto-detect this spam and prevent them from being published, and it wasn't long before conversations started moving to FB, Twitter and Medium.
josefresco 7y ago
SEO Expert: Those techniques don't work anymore! Google is smarter than that. Google: Correct! We don't use those signals anymore! We're soo smart. Me: But my competitors are blatantly using those techniques and they outrank me. SEO Expert: Ummm, yeah but one day it will stop working! Google: Pretend like we don't exist, focus on your users! Me: But I need to make a living now and I don't have any users. crickets
- jordan801 7y ago
  I work as a software developer in the SEO game, and this is exactly how it is. Except theres a client in the middle, reading blogs and telling us how to do it right. Moving from an SEO analyst to Software was the best decision I have ever made.
  - kelvin0 7y ago
    How is that better for you? I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make and I'm interested in your opinion...
kinnth 7y ago
This shit is what now fills up over half of my google searches with listicals and generally fake sites touting deals on any of my search terms. What annoys me now is that copy catting a decent article and just filling it full of ad shit, ranks so well. :( gone are the days where googling for something felt good, it's now a web of sales tactics and copied texts.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  Fuck SEO and fuck those in this very thread who work with SEO. Congrats, you’ve ruined the internet in your race to the bottom for more pennies.
jdbernard 7y ago
As with any SEO tactic that is viewed as shady or potentially underhanded within the community, those who ignore critics and “play to win” by aggressively chasing the opportunity see the best financial outcome. Even if Google deindexes these subdomains tomorrow, tens of millions of dollars have been made in a 1 year time period from this tactic alone. People say things like this and then wonder why SEO has a bad reputation.
kazinator 7y ago
> Common parasites include Medium, Amazon s3, Github, Linkedin, Quora, Youtube, ect. Ironic typo; was that supposed to be common hosts include? ;)

sdan 7y ago

As this post says, Google is taking action against this blackhat method of SEO. Several people have tried to rank as #1 using s3, but Google's ranking algorithm eventually pulls or removes the content from being listed entirely. We're talking about Google here, I'm pretty sure they're aware of this type of SEO hacking.

Matsta 7y ago
The Google algo still loves PDF's. They will review individual URL's if they receive a DMCA, but after looking at Ahref's, I can see the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" PDF (Which I'm guessing can't be legally distributed by the person who uploaded) has been live since July 2018 and is still ranking in Google: https://i.imgur.com/Mp7prUn.png https://i.imgur.com/Mp7prUn.png

dazc 7y ago

'Google Issues Warning About Leasing Subdomains Or Subfolder' https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-leasing-subdomains-or-subfolders-28059.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-leasing-subd...

beobab 7y ago
I like the line in that article which said that they wrote about it "1.5 months ago". It's an oddly precise measurement with an imprecise unit.
spiderfarmer 7y ago
That tweet is in the article.

martin-adams 7y ago

I’ve seen this type of links against s clients domain which wasn’t initiated by the client. We can only think it’s a negative SEO attack, but honest have no idea what the motive behind it is.

Avamander 7y ago
Boosting some competitor if you fall?
- martin-adams 7y ago
  That's the only reasonable conclusion we could come up with.

3xblah 7y ago

Imagine if the "trusted domain" used for the whitelabel site on a subdomain was google.com. Constantly referring to "Google's algorithm" misses the real issue. Google can do whatever it wants. Google can "trust" anyone or no one but itself. Google has all the traffic, not the coupon websites. Do we need laws that govern such middlemen?

fasicle 7y ago
"Google can do whatever it wants" - wouldn't this be anti-competitive behaviour if they stated favouring certain sites in their algorithm? I seem to remember reading somewhere that they get audited to make sure they don't do this, although can't find the link.
- kadoban 7y ago
  I would think they're perfectly allowed to favor certain sites over others, especially with good reasons for doing so. What I would expect to be illegal would be overly favoring their own sites/services over those of competitors, since they are so big and that would be abusing their search marketshare to spread into other markets.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > What I would expect to be illegal would be overly favoring their own sites/services over those of competitors They've been doing this for years in search results, progressively so.
    - kadoban 7y ago
      Didn't the EU get on them for that and they had to pay a large fine? Can't recall the details of what was the offending behavior.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        Yes, but specifically for their shopping product. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024... The practice continues (and continues to worsen), at least in their US version. I can't speak for their European sites.

luckylion 7y ago

Let's be clear here: the content doesn't rank because it's on a subdomain or folder of the strong domain, it ranks because it's there AND gets lots of links from most/all pages of that strong domain. The links are the relevant part, you'd have similar (albeit not as strong) results if you had site-wide links from top domains to your separate domain. Google already has a rule to deal with this: buying and selling links (and, by extension, renting links) is against their guidelines. They just don't enforce it for big publishing companies.

ackbar03 7y ago
From the medium article they link they show that most of the visits come from search though
- ksahin 7y ago
  OP does not say the traffic comes from the links, he said the internal links make the site rank, not the fact that it’s on a high da subdomain/subfolder.

jwilk 7y ago

What does "DA" stand for?

iamben 7y ago
Domain Authority
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Which is an inhouse metric that one of the Major seo tool makers invented to try and measure the authority of a domain - its not a google metric.
  - Matsta 7y ago
    It's Moz's Metric. Majestic has their own metric (TF/CF Trust Flow and Citation Flow) and Ahrefs (UR/DR URL Rating and Domain Rating). I would say Ahrefs's is marginally more accurate then the others but to be honest any of these numbers can be gamed and are not a accurate representation of a domain and/or backlink.
fasicle 7y ago
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages. https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority
- rsync 7y ago
  "You can view a website's DA by using MozBar (a free Chrome-extension), Link Explorer (a backlink analysis tool), the SERP Analysis section of Keyword Explorer, and dozens of other SEO tools across the web." Why wouldn't I just type in the domain at moz.com and look it up there ? </retorical> [1] https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

auslander 7y ago

World needs a Coupon Stock Exchange, like NYSE. Then bundle fake coupons into CDOs.

butler14 7y ago

Ahhh affiliate marketing, still trucking along, still the lowest form of digital marketing Though influencer marketing has been having a good shot at that title in this past 5 years

jwc1 7y ago
I find a decent percentage of influencer marketing is still just affiliate marketing with a slightly different delivery channel.

derpherpsson 7y ago

It took a couple of paragraphs for me to realize what the article was about. I thought it was "Parasite CEO", that the boss is doing nothing while also stealing company resources.. arguably a somewhat common phenomena. But it's about Parasitic Search Enginge Optimizations.

forgotpwd16 7y ago
I thought the same. A parasite boss may be a common phenomenon but searching didn't bring up any interesting articles.

Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

In the next 1-3 years I'm sure Google will update their algorithm against these such of strategies

paulpauper 7y ago

this is not 2007 anymore.Google changed algos considerably over the past decade to make this much less effective.

forgotpwd16 7y ago

Interestingly, most of example sites given were launched within the recent year.

paulpauper 7y ago

This article is wrong on many levels. no wonder so many ppl try this and make no money. >You find a high DA site that allows user generated content to be added and indexed. (the host) >Common parasites include Medium, Amazon s3, Github, Linkedin, Quora, Youtube, ect. Google rank does not apply to subdomains. The subdomain does not inherit any of the rank of the parent. That is why blogspot and s3 will never work in this regard. Parasite SEO boost only works if the link passes ranking, the page itself has a lot of SEO authority, and there are not too many outgoing links. Medium will not work for this reason unless you get your link on a very high ranking medium page. Just posting your link on a new medium blog is useless. Same for Github, Quora, Youtube, linkedin for these reasons.

Matsta 7y ago
Hmm that's not 100% correct. Google still does apply this to some domains. Blogspot is a good example of this. and the s3.amazonaws.com is the same domain for EVERY bucket, so it definitely has link authority. The thing the article missed is that most of these medium/s3/blogspot parasites are a few years old. While a year ago you could chuck up a Medium blog and rank it in under a month, with the most recent Google update, it takes a lot longer to see things ranking. However yesterday I saw an exception to this, as this Medium account ranked in literally 2 days without any backlinks (the page has since been deleted): https://i.imgur.com/8lPHUYs.png https://i.imgur.com/8lPHUYs.png Parasites do work well, you just need to find the right 'secret sauce'. Some people can still spam 1000's of backlinks using Xrumer and/or GSA or slowly drip feed cheap PBN links. The article shows looking for keywords such as 'HostGator coupon' or 'Clash of Clans hack' and you'll see that the top 10 results literally change on a daily basis. People are doing of lot 301 redirects (buy a expired domains with lots of high authority backlinks and 301 it to your URL) and then block the bots for SEO tools like Ahrefs/Majestic/SEMRush etc. so other SEO's can't find their backlinks.
degenerate 7y ago
They are not using the host for link juice, they are using the host for lead-gen. Their PDF document in S3 links to their low-ranking spammy site, but the PDF itself ranks high. Same for medium posts, github pages, quora questions, etc. Search google for "biology 10th edition free pdf" and see what I mean. Some top-ranking hosts are: Quora, Pinterest, and DailyMotion. The parasites are the videos/PDFs/questions/images (user generated content) that link to the low-rank spam site. In some cases like Quora, the link juice is there, because it's not on a subdomain. For subdomains like S3, it's about the traffic/lead-gen, not the pagerank.

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

Is it really "parasite SEO" if CNN decides to use their domain name clout with Google to make a (substantial) profit promoting coupons? Seems like more of a savvy business move on behalf of CNN instead of scummy/greyhat/parasite-seo type stuff, no? It's right up their alley, too. They sell advertisements. Coupons are advertisements.

luckylion 7y ago
> Is it really "parasite SEO" if CNN decides to use their domain name clout with Google to make a (substantial) profit promoting coupons? CNN doesn't. Somebody else "rents" the subdomain from CNN, and they are the parasite that is feeding off of CNN's brand.
- rcarrigan87 7y ago
  It's usually a 50-50 rev share

linuxhansl 7y ago

I have a personal blog and about 80-90% of all comments to my posts are these. In the beginning I just deleted them when I saw them, but then I had to turn on moderation.

rchaud 7y ago
People often point to social media as to why personal blogs died off, but I'd wager comment spam had just as much of an impact. Blogs were huge just 10 years ago, but eventually the sheer volume of spam comments with links to "Air Jordan, Gucci, Givenchy, work from home", really took out the communal feel of the comments section. Wordpress and Disqus didn't act fast enough to auto-detect this spam and prevent them from being published, and it wasn't long before conversations started moving to FB, Twitter and Medium.

josefresco 7y ago

SEO Expert: Those techniques don't work anymore! Google is smarter than that. Google: Correct! We don't use those signals anymore! We're soo smart. Me: But my competitors are blatantly using those techniques and they outrank me. SEO Expert: Ummm, yeah but one day it will stop working! Google: Pretend like we don't exist, focus on your users! Me: But I need to make a living now and I don't have any users. crickets

jordan801 7y ago
I work as a software developer in the SEO game, and this is exactly how it is. Except theres a client in the middle, reading blogs and telling us how to do it right. Moving from an SEO analyst to Software was the best decision I have ever made.
- kelvin0 7y ago
  How is that better for you? I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make and I'm interested in your opinion...

kinnth 7y ago

This shit is what now fills up over half of my google searches with listicals and generally fake sites touting deals on any of my search terms. What annoys me now is that copy catting a decent article and just filling it full of ad shit, ranks so well. :( gone are the days where googling for something felt good, it's now a web of sales tactics and copied texts.

wasdfff 7y ago
Fuck SEO and fuck those in this very thread who work with SEO. Congrats, you’ve ruined the internet in your race to the bottom for more pennies.

jdbernard 7y ago

As with any SEO tactic that is viewed as shady or potentially underhanded within the community, those who ignore critics and “play to win” by aggressively chasing the opportunity see the best financial outcome. Even if Google deindexes these subdomains tomorrow, tens of millions of dollars have been made in a 1 year time period from this tactic alone. People say things like this and then wonder why SEO has a bad reputation.

kazinator 7y ago

> Common parasites include Medium, Amazon s3, Github, Linkedin, Quora, Youtube, ect. Ironic typo; was that supposed to be common hosts include? ;)