Parasite SEO is when a third-party company partners with an established domain, then posts a bunch of SEO content to make a bunch of money.
Content often gets published in a subfolder or subdomain or the website. The goal is to leverage the domain’s trust with Google to get rankings and traffic easily.
With the right agreement, you can make millions just by publishing a bunch of blog posts. Then you’ll monetize everything with affiliate offers and sponsored ad blocks in your posts.
Currently, the most notorious parasite SEO company is Forbes Marketplace. The actual Forbes company only owns a minority share of Marketplace while Marketplace operates multiple subfolders of forbes.com. The Marketplace team has also entered into partnerships with CNN and USA Today to run parasite SEO programs on those sites.
For competitive categories in Google, it’s not uncommon to find a batch of parasite SEO programs dominating the top rankings.
Why Parasite SEO Has Become So Popular
If you want to win competitive categories in Google today, you must adopt a parasite SEO strategy.
I hate that this is the case but it’s true. Partnering with the right domain is such an enormous advantage that no other SEO strategy can compete. You’ll start publishing content and pretty much rank for whatever you want.
The bias that Google shows to major domains is simply absurd at the moment.
Yes, there are a few exceptions. I know of several independent publishers that are doing well. But they are far and few between.
Parasite SEO has enormous upside: I estimated that Fores Marketplace has been doing at least $400 million in annual revenue. That’s Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth.
Even a modestly successful parasite SEO program will do millions of revenue per year. And all it takes is the ability to strike a deal with the right domain.
Now I’m going to show you how to cash in.
Picking Your Site Targets for your Parasite SEO Play
The success of your venture lives and dies on the site that you partner with. Get it the domain wrong and you won’t have the cover you need to run rampant across the SERPs.
A few guidelines:
- If at all possible, get on a top 1000 domain. Beg, flatter, and schmooze your way into the good graces of the folks that control one of these domains. The main parasite SEO programs I know are in the top 1000. And the further down you go, the more risk that you’ll get hit during a Google update.
- News sites do especially well. Prioritize these, Google loves them beyond all reason.
- The US market is getting competitive with multiple parasite SEO companies. Consider jumping into other geographies which tend to be a few years behind the US SEO market.
Do NOT compromise here.
I’d set a goal of having genuine conversations with key players across at least 10 different sites. Which means you’ll probably have to do outreach to at least 100.
These deals will die for all sorts of reasons: killed by a key stakeholder, legal flags, roadblocks while negotiating the contract, etc. So get multiple deals in motion so you don’t end up compromising on the domain strength. Even a domain in the 2,000-3,000 ranking is too low in my opinion. It might work for a while but it’ll be vulnerable during Google updates.
Pitching Your Parasite SEO Partnership
You can’t roll into an all-glass conference room and throw up a bunch of slides that yell “PARASITE SEO = $$$$$$$” for the entire floor to see. It’s uncouth.
We have to dress this pig up.
Roll up your McKinsey sleeves and start using words like “turnkey transactional content” or “white label commerce content”. All the media execs will love that stuff. Then push the benefits of your proposal:
- The host site pays for nothing! No investment, no ongoing expenses, no downside!
- They don’t have to do any work at all! Sit back and collect checks. What’s not to like about that?
- Promise you’ll follow any editorial guidelines or processes that they like. In practice, we all know they’ll get lazy and won’t do or check anything. So this is an easy promise to make.
- Operations will be set up to blend in perfectly with the existing site so no one will ever know.
- People want this content! Tons of people search for stuff like this. We’re just giving the market what they want!
- Instead of building in-house SEO expertise over the course of 5-10 years, our team of world-class experts gets all this going in just a few months!
In other words, make gobs of cash with no downside and no work.
Because these are fancy execs that prefer to play business than actually doing it, you’re gonna have to fill your pitch with a TON of projections.
Traffic estimates, revenue estimates, ranking timelines. All of it.
Now, you and I both know that this is bullshit. That’s not how SEO works. In all my career, SEO growth either exploded past all of my wildest dreams or limped along like a dead fish. Either way, it never hit my estimates. But we won’t tell the fancy execs that. We’ll show them pretty graphs and overwhelming spreadsheets that no one takes the time to look at. With tons of charts that go smoothly up and to the right.
Dazzle them with your numerical bullshit.
How to Structure Your Parasite Agreement
Getting the partnership structure right is actually pretty complicated. And getting it wrong will cause you all sorts of headaches.
You can either form a contractual agreement between your two companies, or you can form a joint venture.
My Recommended Structure: Form a Joint Venture
A joint venture is a new company where both the original companies have an equity stake. Then this new company operates everything for the parasite SEO program. Whenever there are cash distributions or this new company gets sold, money gets distributed based on the terms of the operating agreement.
Why do I recommend an actual joint venture?
To hitch the domain owner to you. The company that owns the domain has all the power. They can cut your access, delete your content, or just take all the content you developed whenever they want. Yes, you can add protection clauses and threaten lawsuits. But that only goes so far. It doesn’t compare to cementing the relationship by forming a new company. Burning an entire equity stake down is a lot more painful than ending a basic contract.
This is what Forbes Marketplace did. They were really smart in setting up a new company, getting Forbes to invest in exchange for a 40% stake, and making the partnership as rock solid as possible. Kudos.
The Easier Structure: A Standard Contractual Partnership
Instead of forming a new company, you could just get a contract signed between your company and the owners of the domain you want to work on. You could call this an asset development agreement or something.
The main benefit of this is that it’ll be WAY easier to get signed. The domain owners aren’t investing any cash, no one is getting any equity, there aren’t any control issues to sort out for a new company. The terms are the terms, that’s it.
The downside is you’ll always be looking over your shoulder. The only protections you have for your company are the protections in the contract. If it was me, I’d always be worried about something going sideways. Then I’d hold back on doing everything I could to make the program as successful as possible. It could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hold back, get beat by competitors, then it wilts and dies anyway.
You also don’t want to have to worry about other parasite SEO companies sniffing around and undercutting you.
If a once-in-a-lifetime type deal starts to blossom, I’d push for the joint venture. Make it as permanent as you can. But for a quick SEO cash grab, I’d understand going for a contractional partnership and keeping it loose.
The Deal Terms of Your Parasite Partnership
There’s a bunch of terms you’ll have to negotiate. Here are the core ones along with my recommendations.
Revenue or Profit Split
Most folks in the space will expect a revenue or profit split. If at all possible, I’d push for a profit split. It keeps the parties most aligned. If you run into any stumbles and need to invest hard for a few years, you want both parties to have the same incentives. And to share the load. I can promise that you’ll get real sick of cutting checks off topline while you’re eating all the expenses during rough periods. Do a profit split if you can.
I guess you could explore different arrangements, maybe a hefty annual leasing fee or something. But I prefer to keep things as simple as possible. And to keep incentives aligned. That’s how partnerships survive.
Split Amounts
Most players will enter negotiations expecting something around a 50/50 split. If the site owners are savvy or have multiple suitors, they’ll probably push for a 60/40 split in their favor.
Closing Fees
A source recently told me that one of the major parasite SEO deals was closed when the parasite SEO company promised to pay the domain owner $1 million dollars just to get started. This was a major media brand.
Be aware of this. I’d personally avoid this at all costs but I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes an industry norm. And if you’re among several parasite players negotiating with a domain owner at the same time, I’d expect someone to play this card.
Payment Schedules
However you do this, don’t promise monthly payments. They’re annoying. Distribute cash on a quarterly or annual basis. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting agreement on this.
Protection Clauses
This part is SO much easier if you have a joint venture. If it’s a standard contract, you need to think through this extremely carefully.
What happens if you dump millions of dollars worth of content into a site, get a ton of rankings and revenue flowing, then your partner cuts you out and shuts down your access? If there’s enough money, at some point, it makes perfect sense to cut you out and bring the whole thing in house.
What happens if another parasite SEO company comes along and undercuts you? The word is out and there are a bunch of companies sniffing around for deals.
What happens if the domain gets sold while you’re operating on it? You don’t own any equity so you won’t benefit by default.
Some ideas to consider:
- A clause that prevents both parties from exiting with less than 2-3 years notice.
- Add any number of destructive clauses, like owning the content you produced and being able to take it with you if you’re cut out of the deal. Unpublishing hundreds of posts during a contract dispute could cause real harm to a site.
- Add a hefty buyout fee if the domain owners want to cut you out on short notice.
- Fees with an included valuation if the domain/business gets sold.
KPI Commitments
Some teams will try to force KPI commitments. Hit X traffic or Y revenue by Z date. And if certain goals don’t get hit, they can end the contract with fewer penalties. Personally, I’d walk if the opposing side is demanding stuff like this.
How to Overcome Objections about Google’s Site Reputation Abuse
As you’re trying to close a deal, you might get objections about how this “white label commerce content” runs afoul of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse policy. In which it states:
To which you’ll yell “preposterous!” And then proceed to counter their objections with any of these arguments:
- Google is generally full of shit and says stuff all the time. Any good SEO knows to take everything they say with a grain of salt.
- We’ve already promised to give the domain owners full oversight, so we’re good!
- If they didn’t want sites doing this, why is it working so well for a bunch of major domains? Sure, some of them have taken some hits but they’re still pulling millions and millions of visitors every month. And the sites that got hit got too greedy, we’ll stay focused on core categories to stay clean.
- This is why we’ll structure operations to keep it completely hidden, they’ll never catch us!
- Google has been fumbling hard the past few years, it’ll be YEARS before they get their shit together and can catch any of this consistently. Let’s grab the gold while we can!
To clarify: I don’t actually believe these arguments. Well, I do believe Google is full of shit and it’ll take awhile before they get their act together. But I don’t believe in the spirit of all this. I do think clueless media execs will believe some of it though.
How to Keep Your Parasite SEO Hidden from Assholes
The biggest risk of running a parasite SEO strategy is that some random asshole on the internet will figure out what you’re doing, then expose it to the entire SEO community.
The whole point of parasite SEO is to fly under the radar and hope that Google never figures out what you’re doing. So put some effort into keeping it that way.
If it was me, I’d try to structure operations to get your affiliate content embedded into the same content flow as the rest of the site. I totally understand that this will make things a pain in the ass. You’ll have a lot less control on blog post templates, internal linkings, CTAs, tracking, etc. You’ll also have to fight the internal time on access permissions and SOPs.
I still think it’s worth it.
It’s not that hard to spot a parasite SEO play when there’s a unique subfolder or subdomain. It’s a dead giveaway. Yes, you could set things up on a unique WordPress install and try to copy the original site design like Forbes Marketplace did with CNN and USA Today. That will make it a lot harder to spot. But if anyone looks closely, you’ll look like you’re trying to do something nefarious.
The rule I’d use: make all the content look like it’s being managed by the real team at the host company. Similar authors, same blog feeds, same site folders, all of it.
Kicking Off Your Parasite Partnership
Okay, you landed the deal. Now what fucking what?
I recommend a T-shaped strategy for content:
- Do a shotgun approach across a range of key transactional content and pillar SEO terms. This is the horizontal piece.
- Pick 1-2 content areas that are really important to you on day 1, then go really deep. This is the vertical piece.
I’ve done shotgun plays with SEO before and they do have their advantages. With a strong domain that Google favors, you will be shocked at the random rankings you grab without any real work. Consider this a radar blast across Google. This used to be a go-to move for any decent site. These days, I would only do this with major media domains. Also, I recommend curtailing your shotgun approach in two ways:
- Don’t go TOO horizontal. Stick to your overall category that your brand is in. So if you’re a business site, I’d do a shotgun play across just business. Expanding into brand-new SEO categories requires a different approach.
- Set a time limit on your shotgun strategy. You do not want to keep pushing horizontally year after year. If you do, your site will get spread way too thin, your team will never be able to stay on top of the content, and eventually you’ll get dinged by Google. Do the shotgun approach for 6-12 months, see what gets traction, then double down vertically. Once you’ve really built things out and it’s healthy, consider another expansion later.
For the vertical push, pick 1-2 content areas that are really important to your goals. I pick these on a mix of mid and bottom funnel overlap with the core business, traffic potential, and revenue potential. Even if there’s little sign that Google favors the site in these areas, I’ll still go hard right from the beginning if I know that category is essential to the business. If you push hard enough, you can create category authority. And if they truly are essential to the business, it’s a matter of time before Google realizes that too.
Out of the gate, I’d be looking to publish 30-50 posts per month.
And I’d be working furiously to put some revenue wins on the board. Once you have a track record going, then you can get to the real foundational work for a healthy long term program. But your partners will be expecting results. The sooner you can point to growing revenue, the better.
Wait, is any of this Parasite SEO stuff a good idea?
I don’t think so.
If I thought it was a good idea, I wouldn’t be sharing any of this stuff.
Google clearly has a long way to go before the parasite SEO era of Google ends. So in the meantime, I want to create as much competition in the parasite SEO industry as I can. The more people fighting for the spoils, the more ridiculous the whole situation gets.
But if a friend asked me if they should start a company to do this, my advice would be fuck no.
It’s nothing more than a cash grab and I don’t believe there’s a way to do parasite SEO while delivering world class content. The incentives get all fucked up:
- You don’t own the domain. So why obsess about content quality? Even if your content starts strong, it will suffer as you scale and you’ll never be able to get it back on track.
- Your partners just want their checks. And any business that makes revenue the end-all, be-all just becomes an extraction machine. They work great until they don’t.
- You’ll always be looking over your shoulder for the Google smack. More short-term incentives to push push push while neglecting real value creation.
Ultimately, I don’t get any pride from a cash grab business. Others might, great for them. I need to go build something that I’m proud of and that helps people. I don’t believe that a parasite SEO program can do that.
