If you’re involved in the SEO world, you have probably heard of the powerful ranking effects of “parasites”. Parasites are inner pages on authority sites which piggyback of their positive stature in Google’s eyes. These pages typically can rank easily and thus can be an awesome traffic source as well as an excellent SEO tactic for funneling link juice to your main site. Sites such as Buzzfeed.com, PRweb.com, and LInkedin.com are all examples of sites that allow you to create inner pages on them. Once you create these inner pages they can rank very quickly.
Why Should You Use Parasite SEO?
Well, it’s quite frankly the best strategy out there in terms of ROI and speed of results. Sites like Buzzfeed.com and PRweb.com rank incredibly easily and can function as landing pages for your business. Parasites dominate the SERP results for many affiliate keywords such as “Fat Loss Factor” (most of the results are parasites for that term). Parasites are also extremely cost effective as they are easy to set up and cost nothing to create (beyond the cost of content and links to rank them). You can also use different media forms with parasites, including videos, images, and written content. Parasite SEO can be an excellent method to rank multiple positions on the first page for a reputation management term. In fact, if you have a tough reputation management term to tackle, parasites should absolutely be your weapon of choice.
Since you can rank multiple parasites on page 1, you can literally dominate an easier niche with little effort. If you’re a local SEO, you should look into parasites as a way to shut out your competition from the first page and horde all the traffic to yourself.
Terry Kyles at SEO Traffic Hacks has an excellent case study on Parasite SEO where he absolutely dominates with the strategy. In his case, he was using it for affiliate marketing and he ended up getting his Buzzfeed parasites onto the first and second pages for a ton of profitable keywords. However, you can clearly see that Parasite SEO is amazing for reputation management as well as branding purposes.
How Do You Use Parasite SEO?
First you must figure out which parasites you want to use. If you’re promoting a product and have an explainer video, perhaps you can rank Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and other video parasites. There are dozens of different parasites on the web, and you can pick and choose which parasite you want to use.
Video Sites
These are perfect if you have a video already created for your business/niche. Youtube ranks very easily on the SERPs. Vimeo and Dailymotion also tend to rank quickly. Create a relevant and useful video and this can be an excellent marketing strategy.
Press Release Sites
PRweb.com, PRlog.com, and Sbwire.com are all press release sites that rank easily. Remember that once you submit your press release you can’t change it, so make sure it’s 100 percent before sending it out. You can even use your press release as a landing page if you do it right.
Forums
Threads on big internet forums can rank very easily. That makes them a perfect parasite page. Do your research and find an authoritative forum in your niche, create a link back to your page, and then rank it.
Social Media
Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn can all be used effectively for Parasite SEO. There are dozens of social networks out there that you can experiment with.
Buzzfeed and Other News/Popular Sites
Sites like Buzzfeed, Digital Journal, and Daily KOS all allow you to create accounts on them and publish content. It’s not the easiest to get an inner page on them, but once created they tend to rank very well.
Product Pages
Amazon, Udemy, Itunes, Themeforest.net and other online store inner pages rank very fast. You will need to have an actual product though, whether it is an online course for Udemy, or a podcast for Itunes, or an actual theme for Themeforest.
Ranking a Parasite
There are various different methods you can use to rank parasites. For example, some people like to use Private Blog Networks (PBNs) to rank their parasites. You could alternatively use spam (think thousands and thousands of links) to help you rank parasites. There are various spam providers on marketing forums like Wicked Fire and BlackHatWorld.
Terry from SEO Traffic Hacks had excellent results ranking Buzzfeed pages with PBN links. In addition, he used a 301 strategy (buy an aged domain with links and 301 redirect it to your parasite). You can even build dirty links to the domain you’re 301’ing for more power.
Building parasites are the way to go because of how easily they ranked. Since they are pages on authority sites Google has no choice but to rank them. They are versatile and can be used for many purposes, whether it’s direct monetization through the parasite page, a solid SEO pumper, branding, or for reputation management purposes.
UPDATE 2/23/16
A bit of an update regarding parasite SEO, and how it has evolved since this article was originally written. I now use parasite SEO for all kinds of different methods. From brand building, to reputation management, to ranking pages to make money.
Let me show you a couple examples.
For brand building
Search term: “SEO Doylestown PA”.
For Reputation Management
**This was a company who stole money from me. Woopsy!
Think outside the box with this one folks. There are a million ways to make money with this.
