SeenBySearch.com gained a new backlink today.
I was checking my SEMrush dashboard just now and noticed my Domain Authority had gone up by 2. All that from one extra backlink?
What’s more: all that from a nofollow backlink?
Turns out, the backlink was from myself — in a way I hadn’t realised would actually affect it. Which brings to mind something I’ve read about but haven’t understood until a bit more recently.
Let’s talk about “Parasite SEO”.
Why parasite SEO works — and why you should do it
In a nutshell, “Parasite SEO” means “borrowing” authority from big websites and having them link to you:
Google trusts big website.
Big website lets me publish content.
My content on big website ranks quickly.
My content funnels attention to my brand.
Parasite SEO is doing this on websites which allow user-generated content, like these.
Medium.com
Substack
Quora
Yelp
LinkedIn
Angi
Houzz
Over the last few years, I’d written quite a lot on Medium.
All I did was update my bio to contain a link to SeenBySearch.com, and now I’ve got a backlink for each article I ever published.
How does it work if the links are nofollow?
We’re not going for traditional backlinks.
The play is to write a keyword-rich article on these sites and have that article rank on Google instead.
This means, for a competitive keyword your domain can’t rank for, you still get visibility on Google’s page 1. It doesn’t matter if it’s not your own site.
Here’s what this accomplishes:
Brand signals
Page 1 visibility
Faster indexation
Pushes competitors down the page
Source of long term traffic and backlinks
The posts don’t even need to perform inside the platform. A Medium post without any claps can still rank.
The reason: the post isn’t targeting readers on Medium.
It’s targeting people entering from search engines — and search engines themselves.
Is it ethical?
That depends.
“Churn and burn” means firing masses of articles at big sites. They quickly rank, but then you use quantity to stay ahead of Google as pages slowly get penalised for being lousy.
But if you’re still posting quality and not just trying to stay ahead of Google, it’s perfectly ethical.
Having all extremes under the umbrella of “parasite”1 is just unfortunate.
I’d say it’s entirely ethical as long as your post does these things:
Brings a fair/balanced argument
Doesn’t read as a giant editorial piece
Links to your business only where relevant
“Writing for algorithms” vs “writing for humans” is still a touchy subject. Medium and Quora are intended for humans, where parasite SEO is entirely aimed at algorithms.
But as long as you’re still bringing something worth reading, I don’t see this as a problem. Humans that aren’t interested are free to ignore it.
It’s not a huge boost. But you know what? For the difficulty of updating a bio and speaking my mind, I’ll take it.
If you want a lift to your brand, parasite SEO is a great strategy.
As ever, if you’re interested in boosting your traffic through SEO, remember you’re welcome to work with me on your site’s visibility!
It’s partly why I went with the image of the sponge for this post instead of an actual parasite, even if “sponge SEO” doesn’t have quite the same ring. Though apparently, “white hat” parasite SEO is sometimes known as “barnacle SEO”.