You may not be familiar with the term parasite SEO but you will have most likely encountered sites using this strategy to rank sites at the top of organic search results.
What is parasite SEO?
Parasite SEO (AKA site reputation abuse) involves leveraging the authority of another company’s domain by creating a subfolder or subdomain on it. A large volume of content (often across different verticals in competitive niches and often linking to affiliates) is then published which exploits the first-party site’s well-established ranking signals, in an attempt to rank those pages higher on Google. And some of the biggest sites out there are doing it.
This has rightly annoyed many SEOs, as many of the top-ranking results were thin, generic, and crafted primarily to earn massive affiliate commissions rather than provide genuine value to users.
Often created with minimal oversight, this content raises questions about its trustworthiness. These articles cover a huge range of topics and are frequently written by generalists instead of experts, resulting in a lower-quality user experience.
Compounding the issue, Google’s algorithm appears to prioritise domain authority over actual expertise in many cases, allowing large platforms to dominate search rankings for affiliate-related terms across various industries.
The impact is that smaller sites, who are actually an authority in these niches find it much more difficult to rank despite writing high-quality, well-optimised content. It’s not good for users either, as sites providing genuinely insightful information are bumped down the page.
An example of parasite SEO in action
Ever wondered why Forbes, a site that focuses on business and economics could rank in the top three positions on page one for things like ‘best pet insurance for cats’, ‘professional SEO services’, or ‘rottweiler temperament’? It’s mostly down to them deploying a parasite SEO strategy.
The vast majority of results are served from ‘Forbes Advisor’ – which was set up as a seperate entity (a completely different company from Forbes which partnered with Forbes to run their SEO affiliate business) with the sole purpose of ranking for as many keywords across as many categories as possible.
By doing this, a huge amount of revenue can be generated via affiliates.
But then, suddenly rankings for Forbes Advisor began to tank.
The first major hit occurred in April 2024, when a huge number of keywords began to drop.
Then, in November 2024, things got even worse with a huge number of keywords previously ranking in top SERP positions dropping off completely.
The graph above shows that from October 2024 to November 2024, the number of organic keywords Forbes Advisor ranked for in top three positions dropped from an estimated 10,402 to 3,279, resulting in a 1.4 million drop in traffic. The impact of this is an estimated $8.6 million decline in traffic cost (a Semrush metric which acts as a measure of what the traffic to a site is worth).
A huge number of keywords they were ranking for in slightly lower positions have also been obliterated from the top 100 SERPs. Yikes.
So why did this happen? It’s all down to an update to Google’s spam policies.
What is Google’s site reputation update?
Site reputation abuse makes up part of Google’s spam policies. And this month, Google announced that it has updated this part of the policy – which is why we’ve seen sites like Forbes Advisor be severely impacted.
The policy now states:
“Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.”
The official announcement goes on to say:
“Aside from site reputation abuse issues, we also have systems and methods designed to understand if a section of a site is independent or starkly different from the main content of the site. By treating these areas as if they are standalone sites, it better ensures a level playing field, so that sub-sections of sites don’t get a ranking boost just because of the reputation of the main site. As we continue to work to improve these systems, this helps us deliver the most useful information from a range of sites.”
Chris Nelson, who works as part of Google’s search quality team, stated: “We’re making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site’s ranking signals is a violation of this policy — regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content”.
Many of these sites will be informed via Google Search Console that they have been slapped with a manual penalty and will need to fix any issues flagged before submitting a reconsideration request.
Forbes Advisor appears to have received a manual penalty – and trying to get around the issue by moving content to another directory won’t resolve this.
SEO professionals weigh in on the update’s impact
Tomas Cecot, Technical SEO Manager at Mediatech reviewed over 3 million affiliate-related queries, which helped to demonstrate the full impact of the update (lol at thesun.co.uk being hit).
SEO legend, Lily Ray, shared her thoughts on what the impact will be on SERPs:
Technical SEO expert, Liam Fallen, highlights what is likely to be the unfortunate human cost of this update for those working on massive projects which took advantage of parasite SEO tactics.
How will the site reputation abuse update change SERPs?
It’s going to take a few days for things to settle down, but there have been some clear winners in the last 7 days:
Time will tell as to whether we will see similar patterns across other competitive keywords, but I really hope the action Google has taken somewhat levels the playing field, giving smaller businesses that put a lot of time and effort into their content and SEO strategies a chance to compete with the big lads.
