Site reputation abuse (parasite SEO)

The rule does not ban third-party content. It bans one specific purpose: publishing it on someone else's domain because that domain already ranks. The difference between a legitimate section and a violation is not who writes the text, but why that text lives in that house.

Google publishes examples in both directions. It counts as a violation when an educational site hosts sponsored payday loan reviews written by a third party, when a medical portal carries a third-party advertising page about "best casinos", or when a news outlet hosts coupons supplied by a white-label service. So does an established site branching into a new topic area mainly with freelance writers.

Not violations: wire service copy and press releases on sites dedicated to them, news syndication between outlets, forums and other user-generated content, opinion columns, third-party content shared directly with readers for promotional purposes, pages with properly marked affiliate links, and coupons obtained directly from the merchant.

The colloquial name "parasite SEO" describes the same phenomenon seen from the outside. Google does not use that term in its documentation.

Ranking signals are not calculated page by page alone. Part of the context Google associates with a domain reaches whatever gets published inside it, and that is where the problem the rule aims to cut off begins: a page placed under a domain with history starts from a position it would not hold on its own.

The update of 19 November 2024 closed the escape route people used most. Google's wording is explicit: using third-party content to exploit a site's signals violates the policy regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content. Google reviewed white-label arrangements, licensing deals and partial ownership, and concluded that no degree of first-party involvement changes the third-party nature of the content. An in-house byline, an editorial review or a joint venture do not take the section out of the rule.

What is documented is the manual action. The notice arrives in the Manual Actions report in Search Console and covers the pages that violate the policy; repeat offences can lead to further actions or affect the site's overall ranking. How far the rule is enforced automatically on top of that cannot be determined from the outside. Google does note that its systems may rank down content that differs substantially from what the site usually publishes.

As a way out, Google's documentation sets out four routes: move the content to a different domain and link to it with nofollow, apply noindex to it, turn it into genuine first-party content, or remove it. Moving it to a subdomain of the same site may be read as an attempt to circumvent the rule. A review is then requested from that same report.

The decision that hangs on this rule is concrete: whether to accept a third-party section on your domain, and on what terms. It comes up when a comparison site offers to host its listings under your brand, when a coupon network offers fixed revenue for a directory, or when an agency suggests opening a new topic area with freelance writers.

The cost of getting it wrong is not symmetrical. The manual action removes from results exactly the pages that were producing the revenue, and Google does not document how long the review afterwards takes. For a publisher, the affected section is often the only one that was monetised. For the brand that paid to be there, the placement simply stops working and nothing usable remains, because that ranking does not move over to its own domain.

There is a decision test you can apply before signing. If the answer to "would this content exist on our domain if our domain had no ranking history?" is no, the section is exposed. It is also worth setting out by contract who fixes the problem and who absorbs the loss if a manual action lands, because that split is almost never written down.

• Build an inventory of every third-party section: path, who writes it, who publishes it and what commercial arrangement sits behind it. Without that list nothing can be assessed.
• Apply the purpose test section by section and record the result in writing and dated, because the assessment changes as soon as the arrangement changes.
• Compare each section's topic against what your audience expects from the domain. The further it sits from the editorial core, the greater the exposure.
• Assign an owner and an email alert to the Manual Actions report in Search Console, so the notice does not sit unread in a shared inbox.
• Before signing with a white-label supplier, set out in writing who fixes what, within what deadline, and who absorbs the revenue drop if a manual action lands.
• If you go ahead with the partner's project, plan it from the start on its own domain with its own track record, rather than solving it with a subdomain of yours.

• Assuming editorial oversight is enough. Since November 2024 the policy says the opposite in as many words.
• Treating all outside content as suspect and pulling press releases, opinion columns or forums that Google names as correct uses.
• Moving the section to a subdomain of the same site and calling it solved. Google describes that as a possible attempt to circumvent the rule.
• Reflexively applying noindex to large parts of the site instead of narrowing the problem to the flagged pages.
• Requesting a review before genuinely fixing anything, which only drags the process out.