In a current article, Lars Lofgren shines a light on the impressive SEO-dominance of the Forbes Marketplace. Even though Forbes is traditionally known for high quality economic journalism, the website now also shows up in the Google search results for topics for which Forbes doesn’t have in-depth expertise – like pet insurances, CBD-products and pest control.
Forbes Marketplace, a company, which operates under the Forbes brand, but doesn’t fully belong to Forbes, uses the high authority of the Forbes-domain to reach the top positions in various affiliate categories. This strategy, which is known as “Parasite SEO”, uses the strength of an established domain to rank content that might otherwise have received less attention.
Interestingly, Google just recently updated their spam-guidelines, with a special focus on the area “Site Reputation Abuse”, i.e. Parasite SEO. Looking at the visibility of the directories operated by Forbes Marketplace on the Forbes domain, it is clear that Google started to follow these guidelines more closely. It seems like we’ve reached the second wave of parasite-SEO-control in this year.
