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Summary If your website is new and you want to rank on search engine pages fast, parasite SEO has all the answers you need. This article explores how parasite SEO works, its pros and cons, and whether it is bad for your business or not.
Key Takeaways:-
In very simple words, parasite SEO involves publishing your content like blogs and articles on credible websites that already rank high on search engines. For businesses and websites that are just starting their SEO journey, this is among the fastest and most effective SEO strategies to rank higher on Google.
As the name suggests, parasite SEO techniques depend on the authority of a pre-existing host platform to give your content the credibility to rank high on the Google SERP (search engine result page). In other words, your content will function like a parasite in drawing value from the host domain’s authority. Thankfully for global businesses, there is a wide array of high-authority websites that host user-generated and branded content. You will be amazed at the quality of results and the rapid pace at which you see it when you use parasite SEO strategies. It becomes so much easier to rank your business content for medium and low-competition keywords.
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Like any other marketing strategy or method, parasite SEO has its pros and cons. Let’s take a deeper look at these:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 1. It is easier to rank your content for highly competitive keywords using lucrative content. | 1. Lower brand awareness since the third-party host domain gets ranked and not your business website. |
| 2. Better content distribution and a larger audience compared to traditional SEO, as established websites always have an active audience. | 2. Lack of control over your content. The host platform can change, enhance, or delete your content in line with their publishing policies. You also cannot modify or update your existing content the way you can on your own website. |
Imagine you need to create content for your brand that aligns with your SEO strategy. Create a high-quality content piece combining text and images. Publish it on a high-authority website supported by social signals, backlinks and other necessary elements.
And that is it! When done right, you can rank for the top Google search results immediately, at least for low-competition keywords.
But what makes parasite SEO so successful? To sum up,
At first glance, parasite SEO might sound like an unfair SEO practice. While parasite SEO itself is not unethical, the way it is used can sometimes be unethical. For this, most host domains have rules to prevent getting themselves from getting penalised. Let’s take a look at parasite SEO as a result of black hat, grey hat and white hat SEO practices .
Recently, Lifewire published an article on the best places to watch movies online.
This page is one of the top search results on Google when you look for a free platform to watch movies. Platforms like Buzzfeed, Scoopwhoop and Quora also publish similar listicle-style content. The way the content is published seems organic. However, there are several reasons to believe it was a content piece created in partnership with one or more platforms. It has several carefully inserted links leading to the movie-streaming services that were being talked about in the content. You must have seen links like this on multiple content pages.
These might seem covert, but now most consumers and Google can identify genuine content and distinguish it from sponsored content.
A few months ago, an article was published on Medium related to the ‘top essay writing services’ that is one of the top search results on Google. This was a high-competition keyword and only high-authority websites were ranking among the top ten, according to Google Search Console.
Doing so helped them to rank higher more easily and faster than if they had published this content on their own low-authority website. The article featured several links to top services related to essay writing, most of which were monetised using affiliate links. If you look at the high volume of website visits through search and the revenue generated per link, you will realise that it is quite a high volume of generated revenue, as compared to if the same were published on the featured businesses’ owned websites.
An article published by Ryan Stewart in 2015 talks about why he stopped selling SEO services.
The way this article was written, there was no product being sold, the author was a subject-matter expert and keywords were spread through the article organically. According to the graph below, the article saw high traffic till 2021, a full six years after it was published!
Given that there is no revenue being driven through this article, there doesn’t seem to be too much point to it. So what was the benefit to the author in writing this kind of article?
The answer lies in understanding how white hat parasite SEO works. Unlike grey hat and black hat SEO, the goal was to build the author’s personal brand and cement his position as a thought leader in the SEO industry. Moz has a large audience of active readers, and becoming an authoritative voice in this space will definitely pay dividends in the future.
Traditional SEO efforts improve the SEO ranking of your business or website. On the other hand, parasite SEO helps individual content pieces rank higher on SERPs based on the authority of already high-ranking pages.
| Parameter | Parasite SEO | Traditional SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Speed of results | The domain is already an established authority, so results are visible much faster. | Since your platform is new and requires authority building from scratch, it will take more time |
| Flexibility and control | You have limited control over your content. The host can modify or remove the content without your approval, but you cannot make any changes once the content is live. | Since you own the hosting domain, you have full control over your website and content. Upload, remove, modify and reshare however you want. |
| Sustainability | Lacks long-term sustainability but instant temporary boosts in ranking are clearly visible. | It helps your business to build an authoritative and sustainable online presence. |
| Costs and effort | It requires less effort than most other SEO or marketing techniques. It is also highly cost-effective. | Requires continuous effort and investment to optimize strategies and SEO efforts. |
Parasite SEO and traditional SEO differ in their approaches. To identify your business goals and understand how parasite SEO can help your business grow, get in touch with our team of experts today.
Conventional SEO stays focused on website optimisation to improve your website’s organic ranking on Google SERPs. In comparison, parasite SEO serves a different goal where you place branded content on external websites with higher authority among search engines. This allows you to use their domain strength to boost your content’s visibility.
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