What is parasite SEO?
Google has recently been pushing back against an SEO trend that has been referred to as “parasite SEO.” In general, this refers to third-party products being sold on already established sites. These host websites have high rankings already – for entirely independent reasons. Marketers have been using them to try to rank higher than they would naturally for a wide variety of consumer-based search terms. Usually, the goal is just to sell products to that consumer, even though the product may have very little to do with the site the person is visiting. It is essentially just a way for this “parasite” site to take advantage of the host site’s reputation and ranking, rather than creating an independent site and getting it to rank highly on its own.
Forbes Advisor
The premier example of this is a website called Forbes Advisor, which is sometimes referred to as Forbes Marketplace. By name, it appears to be affiliated with Forbes, a long-established news website – but Forbes does not fully own these other domains.
Even so, the domains are being used to sell various products that have nothing to do with the news or Forbes itself. For instance, users who searched for “best CBD gummies” have long seen Forbes listed at the top of the search results. This is because Forbes Advisor pages were being used to sell CBD gummies, helping these product pages rank higher than if the companies simply used their own sites. A Forbes Advisor page acts as a funnel to the main page.
Forbes also shows up for other non-related SEO search terms, such as “how to get rid of roaches” and “best pet insurance.” Users will see these results show up at the top of the search page, making them more likely to click on the high-ranking links – especially because they appear to be affiliated with Forbes, a company the user may already trust. But navigating to the search result link just brings the user to another link that takes them to a product page. It has nothing to do with Forbes and everything to do with sales numbers.
Why is Google cracking down?
Google basically considers this practice to be exploitative. They maintain that their focus is always going to be on the user experience. Exploiting the high ranking of a website like Forbes harms that user experience, from Google’s perspective.
It also creates hurdles for other companies that are trying to do their SEO legitimately. For example, some reports claim that this traffic resulted in losses of around $7.5 million. And it’s not just Forbes that uses this tactic. The same thing has been found at Times Stamped, which is affiliated with Time magazine. Google’s goal is to put an end to this process, which means that many smaller pages may start to rank highly for these prominent search terms that have long been dominated by news companies.
It’s always important to understand how Google is adjusting the algorithm and changing what SEO tactics companies are and are not allowed to use. If you have any questions about this process or want to get to work on your own SEO tactics, please get in touch with us here at Content Customs.
