How Parasite SEO can Override Domain Authority

Parasite SEO is the act of posting articles or content on other websites in order to rank highly in search engines without a high domain authority.  Essentially, by posting on another website instead of your own, you’re able to “hijack” that website’s domain authority, increasing your chances of ranking for a specific keyword.  Similarly to how a parasite lives in a host organism, your content lives on a different host website which you can then use to promote your own website or business.

Not all websites will have a great chance at ranking for a search term.  There are a lot of factors to take into consideration, like whether or not the website content gets indexed, the domain authority of the website, and the competitiveness of your keywords.  Guest blogging can be used for parasite SEO, but not much search engine optimization will occur if the website you’re writing on has a low domain authority.  That being said, here are some popular platforms where parasite SEO content is posted include Reddit, Quora, Linkedin, and Medium.

Considering parasite SEO is all about using another website’s domain authority to rank well, one of the best ways to achieve this is through paying for placements. Large magazines, blogs, and publications will oftentimes accept payments to host your content. While paid guest blogging is a popular way of getting backlinks to your own website, it can also be used to hijack another website’s domain authority and rank for a specific keyword.

When you, as a consumer, are doing product research it is highly likely that you end up on a website that lists the best brands of a specific product. What most people don’t realize is that a lot of the featured products are paying for this placement. For example, when we search “best creatine for men” the top result is from Men’s Journal with a big list of brands. A lot of these features link to Amazon, where Men’s Journal earns affiliate revenue, but there are others which link different sites. It is completely possible that a supplement company is paying for this placement on this list, and that would be considered a form of parasite SEO.

Reddit is a content aggregator website that acts like a forum for many different topics.  If you search trouble-shooting questions on Google, you’re likely to stumble on a reddit post of someone asking the same thing.  For this reason, Reddit is a great platform to post content but there are some factors to take into consideration.  First, posts must be made in “subreddits” and you need to make sure your content is welcome on the subreddit.  If you join a subreddit and blatantly spam, the moderator team is likely to remove your content and ban you from the subreddit.  Your reaction may be to pick a smaller subreddit that is less moderated.  However, Google is more likely to index pages that have higher levels of engagement via comments and upvotes.  That being said, it is important to post in a subreddit that will welcome the content as that will increase the chances of your content being indexed and ranked.  The key to having your content welcomed by an online community is to actually add value and to not blatantly self-promote.  Redditors will be able to see through self-promotion most of the time, so make sure to actually engage with the community, learn how they act, and only post content that they will appreciate.

Although the best way to have your content accepted into a community is to become a part of it and add value, there are some ways around putting in all of that effort.  People attempt to cheat the system by using multiple accounts and artificially increasing comments, upvotes, and overall engagement on posts to trick Reddit and Google into thinking that this content is valuable.  While this does not always work, it often does.  I don’t support being deceptive online as that is not a sustainable way to grow your business.  However, some people do this with great success.  If your content is rejected by one subreddit, you can simply go to another and try again.  If your content is not getting traction, you can simply send it to some of your peers and request for them to comment and upvote.

Furthermore, you can create a community focused around your niche to gain more control over the community’s content.  I’ve seen a couple companies create online communities on reddit focused around reviews of their products.  This allows them to gather user feedback, act as customer support, and also rank for frequently searched queries relating to their products.  Furthermore, they have the ability to remove posts and censor what is being said about their products to a certain degree.

Quora functions differently from Reddit in the sense that the questions are already asked, and you are responsible for creating an answer.  This being said, things work a little bit backwards when it comes to using Quora for parasite SEO.  You must first find questions that are already ranking for your desired keywords and then create answers.  The answers are ranked based on their helpfulness, so you need to make sure that your answer actually answers the prompt so that it climbs to the top.  Whenever you do keyword research and stumble across a high ranking Quora page in your niche, make sure to bookmark it and answer it later.

Here is an example of Parasite SEO I found on reddit.  Unsurprisingly, this post was written by a marketing agency, as seen in the link at the bottom.  This post does everything you’re supposed to when it comes to parasite SEO.  First things first, it does not prioritize self-promotion.  The guide written is over 5,000 words and is packed with a lot of value to the reader.  You can tell by the comments that it is well-received and readers found it genuinely useful.  The guide is split into sections and does a great job at explaining things.  Obviously, a lot of time was invested into developing the guide.  However, not that much time was invested in posting it on reddit.  The guide is the exact guide from Apollo Digital’s original blog post on their website.  The digital marketing agency obviously did their research to find which communities would be receptive of their content, as they reposted it on several different subreddits and it was taken well by all of them.  Going the extra step of promoting their own content on relevant subreddits has been very fruitful and they were able to get a much greater return on the time they invested in developing their guide by finding communities to share it with.

This digital marketing agency has also created other longform tutorials that have done really well.  They developed this guide for local SEO that ranks on google for keywords relating to local SEO.  Not only do they provide a very valuable guide, but they also provide free audits to people who linked their businesses in the comments.  This is an excellent lead generation tool for the agency while also providing an amazing public service.  While this exact guide exists on their website, the comments provide additional content and keywords which make the reddit post an even longer form of content than what is on their website.  Differentiation is great when it comes to repurposing content.

Online communities will be quick to reject posts that they perceive as being self-promotion.  The best way to go around this is to be genuine about adding value to an online community.  Do your research and make sure your content will be accepted by the community prior to posting.  If you prioritize contributing to the community over promoting your own business, you will be able to insert your website tastefully.