Google does not use the term ‘Parasite SEO’ internally

It is worth noting that we recently did an article about how Google’s Search Liaison Danny Sullivan uses platforms like Twitter/X and others to take feedback from the community and then shares that internally with his team at Google. That gave us a very good idea as to how our voices are being heard and not every post that we create tagging Google has been going to waste. However, there are terms that Google’s employees would use internally for SEO that we don’t know and vice-versa. Unless and until Google posts something related to it, we won’t know what it calls that method. Same goes for Parasite SEO and it is now known that Google does not have any terms named Parasite SEO and it seems as if the company has a different term for this method internally.

Onreact told Sullivan on Mastadon that “parasite SEO is when a site gets hacked for SEO purposes. Even that is a misnomer as you either fix or break things. You can’t optimize something while harming at at the same time. What Danny means here is piggyback SEO. The site in question does not get harmed.” That is where Danny Sullivan replied, “That’s not the term we’d use internally, by the way. I was referencing how some people externally talk about it.” While this might not be much when it comes to creating a story, it is still interesting how we can create terms and think about if Google uses them or not. Clearly, this is a term Google does not use.

However, we are sure that there is something that Google does call this technique which is externally called “parasite SEO” where people use the good authority of other websites in order to rank their content. At the same time, we should also tell everyone that the user’s comment that parasite SEO is when someone hacks a website is not true as well. It is possible to use someone’s authority without hacking into the site as websites like Google Sites, Medium as well as forums like Reddit have been used for Parasite SEO by many in the field. Apart from that, those sites that allow guest posts on their website can also be termed as Parasite SEO sites.