
Parasite SEO - JohnnyPageviews
https://affiliateinsights.com/subdomain-leasing-affiliate-white-label/
======
paulpauper
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.

~~~
bhartzer
Google WAS actually giving additional ranking benefits to subdomains like
this. Especially subdomains like coupons.domain.com.

However, just recently Google hit these sites hard--giving those subdomains
penalties.

So this "parasite SEO" is really no longer an issue, especially the subdomain
"trick".

See [https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalizing-subdomains-
le...](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalizing-subdomains-
leasing-28203.html)

~~~
paulpauper
that does not surprise me. as soon as something starts to work even just a
little bit too well, google just keeps making things harder and harder

------
josefresco
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
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
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...

------
butler14
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
I find a decent percentage of influencer marketing is still just affiliate
marketing with a slightly different delivery channel.

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

------
luckylion
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
From the medium article they link they show that most of the visits come from
search though

~~~
ksahin
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.

------
kinnth
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
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.

------
dazc
'Google Issues Warning About Leasing Subdomains Or Subfolder'

[https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-leasing-
subd...](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-leasing-subdomains-
or-subfolders-28059.html)

~~~
beobab
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.

------
martin-adams
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
Boosting some competitor if you fall?

~~~
martin-adams
That's the only reasonable conclusion we could come up with.

------
jwilk
What does "DA" stand for?

~~~
fasicle
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
"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)

------
kazinator
> _Common parasites include Medium, Amazon s3, Github, Linkedin, Quora,
> Youtube, ect._

Ironic typo; was that supposed to be _common hosts include_? ;)

------
linuxhansl
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
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.

------
jdbernard
_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.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
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
> 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
It's usually a 50-50 rev share

------
3xblah
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
"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
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
> 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
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
Yes, but specifically for their shopping product.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/06/27/534524024...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-
antitrust-monitor)

The practice continues (and continues to _worsen_ ), at least in their US
version. I can't speak for their European sites.

------
sdan
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
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)

------
forgotpwd16
Interestingly, most of example sites given were launched within the recent
year.

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

------
derpherpsson
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
I thought the same. A parasite boss may be a common phenomenon but searching
didn't bring up any interesting articles.

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

