Parasite SEO - The New Frontier
November 28, 2005
TLB: .info
Date Registered: April 2005
PageRank: 4
Number of pages indexed: 114
Number of Backlinks: 112
Types of Backlinks: Small business directories and some industry related sites.
TLD: Doesn’t have its own domain. It’s a subdirectory of free web hosting .com
Domain Registered: June 2000
Number of pages indexed: 23
Number of Backlinks: 700+
Types of Backlinks: Most links are embedded in a free webpage counter that has been distributed across hundreds of off-topic sites.
Question #1: Which site matches the profile of a search engine spammer?
Question #2: Which site shows up on the first page for dozens of highly competitive searches that all return several million results?
Comments
8 Responses to “Parasite SEO - The New Frontier”
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I am no expert but both websites look like hollow empty shells, the one with the webcounter is kinda funny. The webcounter site shows a fake pr10. But is that spamming? Does site #2 do better because of brute force backlinks? Does site #2 do better because of the age factor to make it more successful?
Question #1: I do not see much spam.
Question #2: Pre-jagger beliefs would dictate that site #2 would do better but my guess is that #1 is doing better if this is setup like a pop quiz.
I’ll give you a hint.
The one that’s getting all the love is for sale.
Interesting, gheeeesh now you are ruining all the fun, I could have used that stats thinger to compete against giants!!! GIANTS!!!
Intersting indeed, does this say that site age + backlinks still works? If I tried that crap on my 1 year old site it would surely get hosed BUT for my gift basket site all the people on page #1 are much older and are complete link whores. People are forced to spam, I wish G would realize this.
So how much are they selling the spam site for? Do people sell websites without them taking a hit?
Site #1 has the backlink profile of someone who is trying to rank well. The directories in it’s backlinks gives the impression that the site owner used a “list of top directories” commonly published on SEO sites. If Google is going after link manipulators, does it make sense for that site to be sandboxed?
Site #2
Google has it’s work cut out.
Not spam, just common sense. Site number two isn’t really for sale, just the “personal-injury” account is. The man is using a hotmail.com address as his contact information. If freewebs.com were for sale, then they’d be using their website contact information.
It’s just good old fashioned common sense to use free hosting with pr passed along to your subdomain account. The age and trust of the domain name are there, along with the links. Anyone can open an account with freewebs.com for free, and in my opinion, free hosting is the way to go, when it comes to getting listed and ranking well in google.
The hell with trying to build a new domain, and trying to get it to rank well and trying to get links to it, without getting penalized because your website is too optimized, or because it appears too much like you are trying to get links to your site.
Just get yourself some free hosting, and post some articles you wrote, or free articles from an article directory, along with some money making ads, and affiliate links, and let it go.
This way of creating a new website, is certainly not spam, it’s just common sense. People using free geocities accounts have been doing it for years, and alot of free geocities accounts are ranking pretty good in google for competitive terms. You can easily score a pr of 5 or maybe even better with these free accounts.
[…] There have recently been interesting examples of how there are still holes but they are fairly technical and closing windows of opportunity, though there are certainly still opportunities for SEO soldiers of fortune. […]
Mike, age of a domain does not transfers to age of a subdomain or directory in a site, so the age benefit of having a page on a free hosting server drops.
Site #1 is PR2 now after the recent up date (down from PR4).
After a quick look with copyscape, it seems that site #1 has more unique content while site #2 has lots of content that is found many other places on the web.
So I think site #2 is more spammy.
Also, since any competitor can create lots of spammy links for a competitor’s site, it wouldn’t make sense to penalize sites for their INCOMING links. However, the kinds of sites a website links to are definitely used to judge a site. Generally speaking, a link profile helps a site (in fact is the most significant factor with Google) when authority/credible sites link to it. However, a site is not (or at least should not be) penalized by having “bad neighborhood” sites linking to it since you only have some influence over who links to you, but far from control.