Parasite SEO describes a tactic where writers take advantage of a larger platform with higher domain authority by writing articles on that platform instead of their own site. The advantages of parasite SEO lie in the fact that the Google algorithm has a bias in favor of larger sites.
It gives little weight to smaller or newer sites, whereas large established sites with higher domain authority are more likely to have their articles rank higher and more quickly on the search engine results page (SERPs). Owners of relatively new websites or writers who have no websites of their own can use parasite SEO to attract traffic to their products or writing.
In this article, I discuss both the advantages and disadvantages of using parasite SEO and how you can develop a proper content distribution strategy around parasite SEO. Read on to learn more.
What Is Parasite SEO?
Parasite SEO is a tactic where the owners of smaller platforms or websites take advantage of the domain authority of much larger sites. These larger sites may make it possible for writers to easily write articles that can rank more easily and higher on Google SERPs.
There are a range of platforms that can be used for parasite SEO. However, the best platforms have low barriers to entry and high domain authority. There are two types of SEO platforms. There are 1. Platforms open to the public (e.g., LinkedIn and Medium) and 2. Private websites that you require permission from to do guest posting.
In this article, we mostly focus on the first category and touch on a few of the characteristics of the second. The infographic below describes the differences between the two types of Parasite SEO platforms.
What is the best parasite SEO strategy?
Choosing the best strategy for parasite SEO depends on what content goals are. There are mainly three types of parasite SEO platforms: 1. Free public platforms open to the public with little moderation, such as Medium and Linked, 2. Paid-for publications, such as newspapers and private websites, and 3. Guest posting.
There are several social media or public platforms that can be used for SEO. The two most popular are Medium and LinkedIn Pulse. Each method or strategy has various advantages and disadvantages. Let’s take a look at each.
1. Medium and LinkedIn
Medium and LinkedIn are social media and blogging platforms. Medium tends to focus on writing and writing-related topics, such as content marketing and making a living as a writer. LinkedIn is a B2B business platform, which focuses primarily on marketing and business topics, as well as thought leadership.
There are several advantages to posting on Medium for parasite SEO. The platform and the blogging content management system (CMS) are easy to deal with, and the CMS even has a premium feel. However, more importantly, these websites are so large, well-established, and powerful that publishing on them significantly increases the chances of an article being seen or ranked on Google.
i. Domain authority over 90
Medium and LinkedIn’s domain authority (DA) are 95 and 99, respectively. This is quite high, as 100 is the highest possible score for DA. In fact, they have among the highest domain authority scores on the Internet. What does this mean for you? Domain authority or DA is a measure of how powerful a website is or rather how likely it is to rank, as defined by MOZ. The higher the DA, the more likely SEO-written content can rank high on Google.
The older a website is and the more backlinks it has, the higher the DA tends to be. Therefore, by posting a blog on Medium or LinkedIn, your article is much more likely to land on the first page of Google and consequently receive several thousand more views than it would if you posted it on your own new website with a DA of 5.
ii. SEO-Friendly CMS
Medium has an easy-to-use CMS system with premium SEO features. They make it easy to embed pictures and add alt descriptions. You can also add meta descriptions and see how many people have visited your article and from where. For instance, you can determine if visitors are from Google or fellow members of the website in the case of Medium.
When blogging on these sites, you should apply the same SEO content writing and editing strategies that you would apply on your website. The only difference is that you would be getting exponentially better results.
This doesn’t mean that you could get away with writing mediocre content. Parasite SEO simply levels the playing field by providing you a platform that allows you greater reach and likelihood of ranking.
iii. Open platforms
Medium and LinkedIn are open platforms. This means that just about anybody can create an account and start posting. There are some restrictions though. In the case of LinkedIn, every article or blog should be accompanied by a post on the timeline (TL).
And they can’t be separated from each other. If you delete the post, you also have to delete the article or blog. This may be discouraging for anyone who is simply interested in posting or publishing articles and less interested in social media engagement.
Medium doesn’t have a TL like what you would expect on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. However, it has interactive features such as comments, highlights of blog sections by readers and commentators, and likes or claps. It is a truer blogging platform than LinkedIn as blogging is its main feature as opposed to liking and sharing content. However, it can be a bit more restrictive than LinkedIn.
The moderators dedicate a lot of time protecting the platform from what they determine to be spammy content. This means you have to be careful of including affiliate links in your content. If you do so, this may mean that your article may not get published. They have a rather lengthy list of violations to look out for.
However, if you’re interested in parasite SEO, you should pay attention to the following violations: “Posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service.” They also don’t tolerate tricks such as “stories where the content is clipped with the purpose of linking to the rest of the article on a different website.”
Medium does have a partner program that involves gating your content. But even then, you have the option of making a friend link available that allows non-Medium members to access your content.
In short, Medium and LinkedIn are social media platforms that have low barriers to entry and high DAs. They can be used to easily rank content that you think has a lesser chance of ranking on your own website.
Plus they are social media websites. While posting SEO-optimized content on these platforms, you can also gain followers, who may turn into leads and eventually sales. This is especially true for LinkedIn where blogs can easily be integrated into your social selling strategies, which are typically defined social media postings.
Remember as mentioned earlier on LinkedIn you can’t separate your TL posts from your blog articles. Every blog article has to be accompanied by a TL post. Instead of seeing this as a restriction, you can embrace it as a chance to integrate SEO content marketing with social media content marketing.
In the case of Medium, you have a true blogging platform that allows you to use a full-range of SEO tools while giving you the advantage of benefiting from a partner program. The Medium Partner Program includes a small monthly subscription where you get payouts for articles based on how popular they are among other Medium members.
Medium also has a number of high-quality publications, which can boost your reputation and reach if you get published in. By linking your site to your medium profile, you can indirectly bring traffic or even brand recognition to your website.
These open platforms should be more than just seen as a free and easy SEO ride. Both the moderation of these platforms and Google itself will likely frown on abusing these platforms for parasite SEO.
When doing parasite SEO on these platforms, the most effective approach is to make parasite SEO only a small proportion of a wider content distribution strategy. This wider strategy should lean more towards respecting the raison d'etre of the platform. On LinkedIn, this should be establishing business relationships with players in the B2B industry. On Medium, it should be participating in a lively and supporting blogging community.
2. Guest posting
Guest posting has been a staple in the blogging world for some time now, and it can be a powerful tool for parasite SEO. It involves finding authoritative and reputable blogs that focus on your niche and submitting guest posts to such websites.
It allows you to create relevant content, including backlinks to your target pages. These backlinks, combined with the authority of the host website, help to improve the ranking performance of content on your website or can increase the visibility of your website in general. There are several advantages to guest posting, such as:
Promoting your reputation in your niche
Driving direct traffic to your site
Building backlinks for your site
Let’s take a look at each point in turn.
i. Promoting your reputation. Guest blogging on prestigious blog or blogs with high volumes of traffic can result in a boost in both your reputation or even personal brand (if that’s applicable) in your niche. Of course, this won’t be easy.
To win guest blog features takes a lot of time and effort. You have to line up possible websites to blog on. Hunt down the relevant persons you can pitch. Find their emails and come up with topics and pitches that they are likely to accept. And you have to remember the competition wil be tough.
Dozens or even hundreds of other people every month will want to be featured as guest bloggers on reputable websites. The more reputable the site, the more people will want to feature on it.
ii. Driving direct traffic to your site. The more popular, the site you guest blog on, the more likely to drive traffic to your site. You do this by either including a link to your website in your bio or by including relevant links to pages on your site in your guest blog.
However, this is something that you have to be tactful with. Most websites will not appreciate you including a bunch of links in a guest blog, especially if these links go directly to service pages on your site. In fact, many websites that host guest bloggers warn to include only “relevant links” or restrict the number of links that should be included in a blog.
iii. Backlink building. The main advantage of guest posting is backlink building. Backlinks have been described as the currency of the Internet. The more of them you have, the more likely your content or individual pages are likely to rank on the Google search engine. But let’s make sure you understand what backlinks are.
Backlinks simply refer to URLs or links from your website that are included on another site. Ideally, they would include links on other reputable blogs. In the world of SEO, a reputable blog can be defined as one with high domain authority. The more links that link back to your blog, the higher the DA will be. Domain authority is a concept that was invented by MOZ and cna be linked to what Google terms as Page Rank. According to SemRush:
PageRank is a Google algorithm . . . that measures webpage importance based on the quality and quantity of incoming links.
New websites with low authority typically embrace guest posting as one strategy to build backlinks and the authority of their new sites. The other alternative is publishing high-quality blog articles on a regular basis and waiting for months or even years for them to collect backlinks naturally.
3. Sponsored content
The last method of parasite SEO is sponsored content. This means finding reputable sites with high domain authority on high-domain authority sites that already rank well and paying them to feature your blog article. This approach typically targets specific niches where ranking using your own relaively newer site with lower DA would take significantly longer and require substantial SEO effort.
This is typically one of the more expensive forms of parasite SEO. It is also very popular and threatens the old-fashioned approach to guest blogging. Often, websites may ask for payment if you request to write on their blogs.
White hat vs. black hat parasite SEO
With sponsored content, you run into the question of whether or not you are violating Google’s standards. The quick answer to the question is yes. Google explicitly forbids paying for links. However, you could never tell based on how frequently it occurs. There are whole SEO agencies that specialize in buying backlinks to help your website rank.
SEO techniques that follow Google guidelines are referred to as white hat SEO techniques, whereas those that use more underhand means is referred to as black hat SEO techniques. White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO differ clearly in strategy.
White Hat SEO focuses on long-term, sustainable growth by adhering to search engine guidelines. Such techniques include quality content creation, proper keyword usage, and ethical link-building. This approach relies on the gradual improvement of your website rankings over several months or even a few years.
For parasite SEO, white hat SEO techniques include:
Guest blogs that are unpaid and rely on genuine collaboration
Guest blogs promoting products on niche-relevant sites
Blogs on social media sites that satisfy customer search intent
By contrast, Black Hat SEO uses underhand techniques to achieve fast results by exploiting the Google search engine. In parasite SEO, this includes:
Paying for your blog to be featured
Using blogs to sell products on sites unrelated to the product
Using link farms
Black hat parasite SEO may seem attractive. It promises to exchange time and energy with cash. However, there is a high risk associated with black hat SEO. There is a game of cat and mouse being played between Google and sites that engage in black hat SEO techniques.
Black hat SEOs may get away with it for some time. However, frequently Google will score penalties against them, and websites will go from tens of thousands of views to irrelevance in a week. Here at EminentEdit, we offer white hat SEO strategies using LinkedIn that can be integrated with a proper thought leadership strategy.
Get in touch with us for help in writing high-quality White Hat Parasite SEO Content |
Incorporating parasite SEO into your content distribution strategy
Parasite SEO should never be the center of your content strategy. Instead, it should be part of a larger and much more comprehensive strategy that focuses on your website. There are several advantages to SEO. It allows you to:
Rank for high-value and high-difficulty keywords
Increase the visibility of your content
Eventually increase site visibility and ranking
Parasite SEO is not an excuse to ignore proper SEO content-writing and SEO editing techniques. The same on-page SEO principles that go into any other piece of content on your website should apply to parasite SEO. More importantly, always focus on satisfying customer or searcher intent. The ultimate point is not to just rank, but to answer customer or searcher queries satisfactorily.
You should resort to parasite SEO strategy for keywords that are too difficult for your website to feasibly rank for considering its age and DA score. However, the ideal parasite SEO strategy is white-hat guest posting that increases the backlink profile of your website in the long term.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, October 24). Parasite SEO: An Introduction. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/parasite-seo-an-introduction |
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