What's Your Experience with Parasite/Satellite SEO in 2021?

[AlexR]

Hi All

Is anybody actively using this strategy still?

Many Thanks!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yes, there are people still actively using this strategy, though the cost of entry has changed. The days of adding a spun article to your MyFitnessPal profile's "about" section are long gone. And to justify the increasing costs, you need to target more competitive keywords, which only increases the risk and inflates the costs further. If you can make it work, you can stack gwop.

The problem is, and this is from personal experience talking to people doing it, is that the grass is always greener on the other side. It's cool that you can make a ton of money without even having your own website. But it's not stable, and the real question is for how long will the method survive at all in it's current evolution? (and I'm being purposefully vague about not airing out what the actual method entails).

The people I know doing it wish they had their own authority sites that earned a fraction of what they're making but offered them the certainty of longevity and cash flow they can depend upon. That's straight from multiple independent horse's mouths.

I say, if you can figure out how to make it pan out and lucratively, then strike while the iron is hot. But each Google update shuffles crap around and you moving from even just position #1 or #2 to #6 can ruin the ROI of the method. And then you have to shovel more dollars into the coal furnace to get it producing steam again, only kicking the can down the road. With that being said, one of the people I'm talking about is earning life changing amounts of money, not every month, but every day. You'd be surprised by the amount of money coming out of this machine, but even more surprised by the amount going in.

 

[bernard]

Interesting topic, I do see far less "spam" in the results these days, hardly any honestly, unless we're talking certain shady topics, but maybe it was always like that.

 

[AlexR]

@Ryuzaki - thanks for that detailed response!

For me I'm exploring it as a method to pass link equity through a buffer to my money site, so that I can turn it off if it goes south.

Or is there a better method you know?

@Ryuzaki - do you by any chance know what kind of links these parasites can take without going toxic?

For example, do you use them as a buffer for PBNS? Or slam them with automated link building tools?

 

[Concept]

A friend of mine is pumping out a bunch of articles with his own affiliate links to a number of high DR sites, where they are getting published (with his links) and easily ranking - some within a week or two. And for some pretty competitive keywords as well.

He doesn't know how long that will last, but he's milking it for all he can and making some nice $$$$$$

 

[AlexR]

A friend of mine is pumping out a bunch of articles with his own affiliate links to a number of high DR sites, where they are getting published (with his links) and easily ranking - some within a week or two. And for some pretty competitive keywords as well.

He doesn't know how long that will last, but he's milking it for all he can and making some nice $$$$$$

Good to know! What kind of links do you recommend sending to these parasite sites?

 

[Concept]

Good to know! What kind of links do you recommend sending to these parasite sites?

No idea TBH.

These sites are legitimate sites that allow him to post guest posts with his own affiliate links in them. He's piggybacking their domain authority and managing to shoot his article to the top of SERPs for particular keywords. He's then reaping the rewards as people click his affiliate links in the guest post.

If he is sending links to it, likely a combination of guest post + tier 2 PBN links. But I'm not sure he even needs to do that.

 

[Stones]

Have seen this work in the last couple of weeks. Got pushed off the top spot for a lucrative set of keywords by one of these. Was surprised the site allowed the aff link.

 

[rigby]

@Ryuzaki - thanks for that detailed response!

For me I'm exploring it as a method to pass link equity through a buffer to my money site, so that I can turn it off if it goes south.

Or is there a better method you know?

@Ryuzaki - do you by any chance know what kind of links these parasites can take without going toxic?

For example, do you use them as a buffer for PBNS? Or slam them with automated link building tools?

Not sure if it was written by Glen Allsopp (couldnt find anything), but I remember an article about doing "whitehat" parasite seo site building purely for passing back to the money site the backlink juice that the satellite project would attract - proven it creates enough value for people to use and talk about it.

I think this is exactly what Mikael Cho did with his marketplace for photographers (crew) and his satellite site (unsplash).

Few examples that I can remember come to mind :
a tyre ecommerce that builds and hosts a tool to find the perfect size tyre
a website that calculates how many tp rolls you will need during next pandemic (lol)

tldr: make satellite sites that provides a ton of value for free. Direct PR/backlinks back to your main site

 

[DunderMannen]

I worked with it at the end of last year up until like February this year, and I must say it workee very well for me. I didn't know much about SEO at all but one of the "articles" I posted made me 250$/month. That's pretty lucrative imo, but then that parasite started adding "noindex" to everything posted and I moved onto my own sites instead.

 

[pluto]

I used to use parasites a lot as well but a lot of the old sites are no-indexing posts as well....what are the best sources for parasites these days?? and best places to get links to build to the parasites