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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

This article is wrong on many levels. no wonder so many ppl try this and make no money.

>You find a high DA site that allows user generated content to be added and indexed. (the host)

>Common parasites include Medium, Amazon s3, Github, Linkedin, Quora, Youtube, ect.

Google rank does not apply to subdomains. The subdomain does not inherit any of the rank of the parent. That is why blogspot and s3 will never work in this regard.

Parasite SEO boost only works if the link passes ranking, the page itself has a lot of SEO authority, and there are not too many outgoing links. Medium will not work for this reason unless you get your link on a very high ranking medium page. Just posting your link on a new medium blog is useless. Same for Github, Quora, Youtube, linkedin for these reasons.

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Hmm that's not 100% correct.

Google still does apply this to some domains. Blogspot is a good example of this. and the s3.amazonaws.com is the same domain for EVERY bucket, so it definitely has link authority. The thing the article missed is that most of these medium/s3/blogspot parasites are a few years old. While a year ago you could chuck up a Medium blog and rank it in under a month, with the most recent Google update, it takes a lot longer to see things ranking.

However yesterday I saw an exception to this, as this Medium account ranked in literally 2 days without any backlinks (the page has since been deleted): https://i.imgur.com/8lPHUYs.png

Parasites do work well, you just need to find the right 'secret sauce'. Some people can still spam 1000's of backlinks using Xrumer and/or GSA or slowly drip feed cheap PBN links.

The article shows looking for keywords such as 'HostGator coupon' or 'Clash of Clans hack' and you'll see that the top 10 results literally change on a daily basis.

People are doing of lot 301 redirects (buy a expired domains with lots of high authority backlinks and 301 it to your URL) and then block the bots for SEO tools like Ahrefs/Majestic/SEMRush etc. so other SEO's can't find their backlinks.

They are not using the host for link juice, they are using the host for lead-gen. Their PDF document in S3 links to their low-ranking spammy site, but the PDF itself ranks high. Same for medium posts, github pages, quora questions, etc.

Search google for "biology 10th edition free pdf" and see what I mean. Some top-ranking hosts are: Quora, Pinterest, and DailyMotion. The parasites are the videos/PDFs/questions/images (user generated content) that link to the low-rank spam site.

In some cases like Quora, the link juice is there, because it's not on a subdomain. For subdomains like S3, it's about the traffic/lead-gen, not the pagerank.

Google WAS actually giving additional ranking benefits to subdomains like this. Especially subdomains like coupons.domain.com.

However, just recently Google hit these sites hard--giving those subdomains penalties.

So this "parasite SEO" is really no longer an issue, especially the subdomain "trick".

See https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalizing-subdomains-le...

that does not surprise me. as soon as something starts to work even just a little bit too well, google just keeps making things harder and harder

Did you look at the examples in the article?

"Google rank does not apply to subdomains. The subdomain does not inherit any of the rank of the parent."

Enter coupons.businessinsider.com, coupons.cnn.com, or discountcode.dailymail.co.uk into Ahrefs and you will see this is not true.

"That is why blogspot and s3 will never work in this regard"

The article has multiple examples of s3 parasites ranking for competitive affiliate terms like "Hostgator coupon" and "Bluehost coupon". If you search those terms now you will see sites.google and s3 parasites.

yeah that is because those examples get link juice from the parent. cnn probably links to coupons.cnn.com on all its pages and probably also buys links for it too.

Anyone who spends 30 seconds checking a search result can see that you're being a bit misleading here.

The #3 and #4 results for me for "HostGator coupon" are Amazon s3 and a Google sites page

Obviously it still works.

Clearly there's ways to do it wrong that won't work, just like anything else.

The biggest benefit to doing this strategy is 0 risk for spammy and abusive SEO practices.

Since you're not connecting them to a domain you own, this could be done fully anonymously.

it has to do with banklink quantity and quality. the fact it is hosted on s3 or google contributes next to nothing. these sites accumulate tons of backlinks.

"next to nothing" in highly competitive seo spaces is definitely something. Maybe not a big deal in less competitive search results sure. The difference in clicks from the top 3 results and the rest is huge.

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