Have you ever come across that one shortcut that everyone talks about and promises will help you get what you want? Take, for instance, the hypothetically awesome hack: “Use the domain authority of an established, high-ranking site to sneak into the SERPs.” Sounds cool, right? Well, it’s also dumb, and I’ll tell you why. First, there’s the “why” of the SEO.
Parasite SEO is what happens when an SEO tries to use rented space on an already successful site to shortcut their way to success in Google. You’re not actually getting “found,” and you’re not actually gaming Google’s system. You’re doing something even worse: You’re creating a potential entry point for a very fast Google algorithm update that could take you down in just a few days.
How does parasite search engine optimization (SEO) work? This is a good question. The basic idea behind it is that you take your content and post it on a site with high authority (like Medium or Quora, or sometimes, less credibly, on various press release sites) and hope that Google will rank the page you’ve created there because of the authority of the domain itself. Yes, these sites have crazy authority, and you might see a brief uptick in visitors. But what happens next is the key thing to understand: after the uptick, you return to baseline. The strategy lacks sustainability, lacks long-term value, and lacks credibility.
Initially, I was drawn to the concept of Parasite SEO. I found it fascinating—why not, really—because it’s basically a way to cheat the search engine results. But the more I read about it, the more it came across as an ill-informed way to go about trying to win at “the game” of getting your website to rank. And why is that so? Well, that’s what I’m going to attempt to explain.
The Problem with Building on Someone Else’s Property
Parasite SEO is very unpopular among many SEO practitioners, and for good reason. It has some very major drawbacks that are associated with it. And let’s face it: It’s not a style of SEO that we want to advocate for, especially when the other choices you have—like white-hat SEO—tend to make you much more in control of your destiny as a publisher.
The first and foremost problem with parasite SEO is that you don’t control your content. I don’t care how many keywords you’ve packed into your article. If someone else has paid for the privilege of using that site’s domain authority, they’ve planted a flag on top of that site. And if someone is de-platformed, for whatever reason, all the content that was ever housed on that site is now gone, or at least it’s very inaccessible.
I have seen it happen—people putting their hearts and souls into articles, thinking they had found the golden ticket to the top of search engine results, only to have their pages removed without warning. … And let us not forget the other side of the coin: when you are hosting your content on someone … else’s site, you are competing with all the other content on that domain. You might think, “Hey, at least … I rank because this site has killer [domain authority]. … But you’re not the only one thinking that. … … and the more people jump on the Parasite SEO bandwagon, … well, the more diluted the effectiveness gets.
In the arena of SEO, you’re not just pitted against the competitors you see every day—you’re up against every other SEO who is trying to work the same system. It’s like being in a room full of people all trying to shout above one another. But when the dust settles, the big loser is always Google. In my experience, I’ve only ever interacted with one site that used Parasite SEO as part of its overall strategy. The site had seen some success for a while, but at the end of the day, it was a house of cards built on a strategy that led to the site getting penalized. Whoops.
The effort they had put in? Disappeared. The money they had spent? Thrown away. And the reputations they had built? Smashed to pieces. It’s like being on a highway shooting toward the sun with glaring headlights. At first, it seems like a brilliant idea, but after some time, you realize you’re not building your authority in the process and you’re not accumulating any wins. A few moments of reflection reveal that you’ve built nothing lasting. Instead, you’ve set yourself up for a crash diabolical in CAD terms (imagine just looking at the pieces and not being part of the investigative team that figures out what happened).
Consider this: As you pursue traffic on an outside website, your own site sits in neglect—backlink-less and authority-less. Yet, you expect your website to be a worthy competitor in your niche just because it’s “yours.” That’s how we all felt back in the early days of SEO, when the Pyramid scheme lackey got us to (silly us!) build some backlinks to domain authority. And the link schemes worked! At least, they felt like they did. One of my clients who had been relying heavily on Parasite SEO told me, “It felt like I was winning at first. Then, suddenly, it felt like I had nothing to show for it.”
The problem with shortcuts is that they seldom result in enduring success. When you funnel all your resources into the tactics of Parasite SEO, you favor ephemeral growth over long-term prosperity—guaranteeing you a slot in the SEO rat race. I can picture what you’re thinking: “But hold on, isn’t there a case to be made for Parasite SEO?” Yeah, in certain, tightly constrained sets of circumstances, it can yield a lift.
But that’s not what we’re on about here. We’re interested in Sustainable SEO—the kind of plan that’s conducive to you becoming the tortoise rather than the hare.
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