What Is Parasite SEO? Parasite SEO is the practice of hosting an affiliate landing page on someone else’s website and ranking it. Typically, this is done legally through paying for the piece upfront or renting a keyword URL from a powerful domain. It is sometimes done by more black hat and less above-board methods, although this has become less common in recent years. Some common examples around in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) at the moment are outlookindia.com, sfgate.com, timesunion.com, miamiherald.com or orlandomagazine.com, all of which I have worked with personally on this model. At first glance, these may look similar to a lot of the big publications that are posting affiliate pages, but they operate in a completely different way in that their internal teams have little to do with these pages beyond editorial. A quick look at the SERPs for “best online casinos” being a perfect highlight of the current state of affairs. And while some sites are prohibitively expensive to test the waters for most affiliates, Outlook India pieces can start from as little as $500! And considering placing optimized content on that site can pretty much guarantee Page 1 rankings of said article for at least a short time, these sites are becoming rapidly flooded by affiliates in the know. Is Parasite Here to Stay? Parasite has been around for a while and while there is some rotation in the sites that perform well — see the recent surge earlier this year to the top by outlookindia.com and orlandomagazine.com — it is unlikely to go away any time soon. Why Are Parasites Dominating? There are a couple of reasons for the domination of parasites at the moment, but the main element comes down to links. Under the current update, most affiliates simply can’t compete. If 100 affiliates are all pushing links toward their own pages on a single site, this overall authority boost only makes the parasite websites stronger. And while the majority of these links may be low quality, in many cases, they’re propped up by PBNs and RankerX, leading to a level of anchor diversity and link velocity that’s almost impossible for site-owning affiliates to match. To highlight the volume that you’re competing against, see the image below. Not many of us can build 7.7 million backlinks in six months. Added to which there’s the fact that when a page costs a few thousand and doesn’t have the same time investment that an affiliate has to put into a complete website, parasite affiliates are able to be a lot riskier and more aggressive with their tactics. For example, the risk of ranking losses or even sitewide penalties is distributed between dozens, or even hundreds, of parasites - so even if half of them get spanked by an update, you rarely run into danger of losing all search traffic over night by having your own domain hit. There’s also the fact that the larger parasite affiliates that have been operating for some time utilize a link-wheel method between multiple pages on the same topic. Thus, compounding the overall authority and making it very difficult to break into the SERPs without going after more niche terms, becoming over focused on a couple of pages (thus creating an unnatural profile and issues later) or engaging in parasites themselves. HowTo Get in on Parasite SEO? The smartest thing to do is to catch an upcoming site (I was personally lucky enough to catch Orlando Magazine on the upswing in the health sector, being too late for iGaming) and get in before it gets flooded. Many will only allow a keyword to be targeted once or place restrictions on the regularity of a certain type of content. And a lot will even engage in exclusivity deals, thus restricting access to new affiliates, for example renting whole PARASITE SEO G P W A t i m e s . o r g 26
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