Parasite SEO and Google's site reputation abuse policy

Parasite SEO is the practice of placing pages on a strong, established domain, such as a news site's coupon section, a big platform or a university subdomain, so they rank quickly on that domain's reputation rather than their own merit.

Google's spam policies call this site reputation abuse: publishing third-party pages on a site mainly to take advantage of the host's ranking signals. Google treats the pages as spam whether or not the host site's owner was involved.

What Google does about it

Google's policy says that outside the European Economic Area, affected pages may receive a manual action in results shown to those users. Inside the EEA, such pages may be categorized separately from the main domain and aren't subject to the manual action's impact.

What's still allowed

• Third-party content that's part of the site's purpose and under its editorial control, such as wire stories, syndicated news or user forums.
• Clearly labelled advertorial or sponsored content that isn't made mainly to rank.
• Guest contributions from genuine experts on topics the site covers.

Instead of renting someone else's reputation

Publish on your own domain and earn mentions on others. Links and mentions from editorial sites are worth building; borrowed rankings disappear with the next policy enforcement. See link building.