Parasite SEO Explained (It's Not Always Evil!)
Parasite SEO can help you rank for more competitive keywords, rank faster, and get more traffic to your content.
But do these benefits come at the risk of a Google penalty?
It depends…
Examples of parasite SEO
Black-hat: Outlook India’s page on the best free movie streaming sites
Between July and December 2023, this page on Outlook India attracted between an estimated ~25K and ~377K search visits per month!
Although the page did not declare sponsored content, it was clearly that, as the piece contained multiple very dodgy links to a movie-streaming service. It was trying to turn traffic into users.
The content was also absolute trash. ChatGPT could write better.
Sidenote.
The site these links went to isn’t even indexed by Google anymore, so I assume it was pretty sketchy!Grey-hat: Washington City Paper’s post on the best essay writing servicesA marketing agency used parasite SEO to rank for “top essay writing service”—a highly competitive keyword with a Keyword Difficulty (KD) score of 87 and only high-authority websites ranking in the top 10.
They did this by publishing a sponsored post on a strong DR 80 site: washingtoncitypaper.com.
It’s likely that this helped them to rank faster and more easily compared to publishing on their low-authority DR 4 website:
How did this benefit them?
Their post features a list of links to top essay writing services—half of which are monetized with affiliate links (see the highlighted ones below):
According to Ahrefs, this page gets an estimated 2.7K monthly visits from organic search…
… and one of the affiliate programs has a 60% commission on first orders over $60:
Even if we assume that only 1% of those 2.7K visits result in an affiliate conversion of $60, that’s potentially ~$1K/month in affiliate revenue for the agency.
White-hat: Moz’s blog post on SEO servicesIn 2015, Ryan Stewart published a post on the Moz blog about why he stopped selling SEO services.
This ranked for the keyword “SEO services” (as well as many others) for years—getting thousands of monthly organic visits as a result.
The estimated organic traffic graph above shows that the post’s traffic only dropped off in 2021. It ranked pretty well for almost six years before that.
At the time of publishing, Ryan ran WEBRIS…
Here’s the difference in WEBRIS and Moz’s Domain Rating (DR) at the time of publishing:
Given that DR is logarithmic, DR 90 is massively more authoritative than DR 53. This is likely part of the reason Ryan’s post ranked so quickly and for so long. It probably wouldn’t have done quite as well if he had published it on his own website.
What did Ryan get out of this? Unlike black-and-grey hat parasite SEO, the game here wasn’t to directly monetize the content. It was to build Ryan’s personal brand and establish thought leadership in the space. After all, Moz has a lot of readers.
Why does parasite SEO work?
Parasite SEO works for a mix of three reasons:
You benefit from the site’s ‘authority’Google representatives have said many times that website authority isn’t a ranking factor. But what is a ranking factor is PageRank (PR). Despite being decades old, Google still uses this to help rank websites—and high-authority sites have more of it than low-authority ones.
For this reason, the average page on a high-authority website has more ‘authority’ than the average page on a low-authority website. This is because internal links to the page send it more PageRank.
You benefit from the site’s ‘topical authority’If you’re posting on a site with lots of content about a particular topic (as big sites often have), your post will likely have internal links with relevant anchor text from lots of similar content. This helps build “topical authority” because Google uses anchor text to help rank web pages.
Google employs a number of techniques to improve search quality including page rank, anchor text, and proximity information.
You (might) benefit from the site’s ‘brand equity’People want to see results from websites they know and trust, right? This likely means that big, credible sites will have an easier time ranking in search because searchers trust them more than small unknown sites. (Or maybe it’s just because Google favors big sites these days?)
How to do parasite SEO
If you’re sold on parasite SEO and want to try it, there are only four steps to the process.
1. Find high-authority websites ranking well in your nicheThe best contenders for parasite SEO are websites already ranking well for the types of keywords you want to rank for. Here’s a quick way to find these sites in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:
- Enter a handful of similar keywords to what you want to rank for (10-20 is plenty)- Go to the Traffic Share by Domain report
- Competitors
- Niche blogs
- Newspapers/magazines
- Search for site:theirwebsite.com
- Filter for pages published in the last 90 days
- Go to the Authors tab
- Enter reddit.com
- Go to the Organic Keywords report
- Filter for- URL contains comments (this excludes subreddit homepages)
- Top 5 rankings
- Keywords you want (e.g., ones containing “essay”)
- View “Main positions” only (this removes the discussion and forum results)
- Link building is a lot of work. Unless you’re buying links or building bad links (don’t do this!), link building is hard. If you’re going to go to that effort, it’s probably better to publish content on your own website and build links to there.
- It might be a waste of time (and money). If you’re doing parasite SEO on news websites, they’ll probably get penalized at some point. If this happens, all that hard work building links will be for nothing.
If you still want to build some links to your parasite post, check out the resources below.
Further reading
Final thoughts
Parasite SEO (or barnacle SEO, or whatever you want to call it) isn’t always bad.
Got questions? Ping me on X or LinkedIn.
https://www.leadbuildermarketing.com/parasite-seo-explained-its-not-always-evil/
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