This will be the first post in the new ‘SEO 101’ category. I want to cover here basic terms and basic SEO tactics for newcomers and intermediates. If you are an experienced SEO you might want to skip this post.
Lets begin…
The term ‘Parasite SEO‘ goes a little round lately and there’s some confusion about it, because the term ‘Parasite‘ was used in the industry in the past already.
What’s a Parasite?
A Parasite is a biological oder medical term. From Wikipedia:
“Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life”
It means that some organism lives on or inside another organism. Simple.
History of Parasites in SEO
In SEO jargon a ‘Parasite’ is a property you could use for your SEO endeavor.
Lets go back over a decade. Nowadays they aren’t that huge anymore, but 15 years ago blogging services like wordpress.com or blogspot.com were heavily used.
Parasite Hosting
You could create whole sites on them. Building a site there and rank it was named ‘Parasite Hosting’, because you ‘hosted’ your site as a ‘Parasite’ on their host (i.e. wordpress.com/blogspot.com). There were plenty of such free hosts out there and also plenty of tools exploiting them for exactly that.
Some allowed you to create your own sites there, some only provided templates while others were mostly just a profile page which allowed some text and a link maybe. You didn’t pay for that of course, you just registered a free account and dropped your ‘gems’ there.
That’s Parasite Hosting.
Your (content-)organism lives on/in the other (blog-)organism.
Here’s an important point I want to put your attention to: In biology, the host organism didn’t invite the parasite!
Before we move on we need to talk about another term:
Guest Posting
Guest Posting means you send someone else a piece of content and he publishes that piece of content on his website. Could contain links, could be nofollow links, could be written by the site owner. The important part is, you normally ‘asked’ for invite. I would say, in almost all cases, you either paid money, or with a guest post of your own in exchange.
Well ranking sites, like Newspaper sites for example, made a whole business around that. Because of the way Google is currently ranking pages, they are ranking for many terms with ease, thus ‘renting’ their spots to people willing to pay them.
You are a guest on their site, in their house. You pay the entrance, put your nofollow socks on and are invited with your post 😂
Parasite SEO?
So what’s this new term all about? It seem that it’s actually just a ‘rebranded’ name for ‘guest posting’, to sell something under a thrilling name.
The host gets paid, hence inviting the SEO and his post. Not that parasitic if you ask me…
I have no idea for what you would need a course or ebook on guest posting, but we all gotta live… 🤔
I would suggest you forget about the term ‘Parasite SEO’ and use the terms I described above. They are well established and everyone in the industry knows what you are talking about.
But seems to be too late already. The industry always needs new buzzwords… 😂