What is Parasite Hosting?

Many of my colleagues in the SEO field give me dumb looks when I start talking about parasite hosting. (OK I can’t see their faces through the IM window, but if I could I’m sure they’d be giving me dumb looks.)

It seems that a lot of people haven’t heard of parasite hosting, and that’s a shame because it’s currently overtaking the Google SERPs like a swarm of locusts.

http://justrpg.com/profiles/atlus-2 Parasite hosting is the process of creating spammy keyword filled pages on an older trusted domain. Once they get this page to rank, they can direct traffic elsewhere. Many of these pages just contain 1 link for the user to click over to the desired page.

If you don’t believe me, just do a Google search for buy cialis and look at all the .edu domains that show up. Clicking the first result you’ll see some text on a page, and then a giant image link to a place where you can actually buy cialis. (/me cringes at the thought of all the spam I’m going to get after pinging weblogs.com with a post that contains “buy cialis”)

The same is true for some other spammy searches. As seomoz pointed out, even Forbes is getting in on the benefits of parasite hosting.

Basically, what this tells us is that it’s important to have a trusted domain. Let’s say for example you have a website that sells widgets and you want to branch off into selling sprockets. Should you make a separate website, or keep them together?

According to the success of the parasite hosted sites, you’d be best to just add some sprockets pages into your widgets site. It kind of makes me wonder what I could get away with on a 7 year old PR5 website (not that I would!)

1 comment April 10th, 2007

Suggestions for MyBlogLog

As you can see from the dotCULT sidebar, I’ve been using MyBlogLog for a few months now. If you haven’t tried it out, you probably should. It’s neat to be able to put a face with your readers.

Some of the things I love about it are the ability to accurately track both adsense and YPN clicks. I like that feature so much that I’ve installed it on a couple of other sites just for the stats.

With that said, there’s a few places I’d like to see some improvements on the stats.

For starters, it’s impossible to share your stats with others. Why is that? I’m in talks to sell one of my sites, and there’s no way for me to share stats. An export feature here would be great. Failing that, sizing it so that I can fit the whole report on a screenshot would be ever better.

I like the dashboard for each day. It’s great to see the top 10 referers, pages, and things people clicked. But if you try to run this for a date range it limits you to one category at a time. Why? I’d love to be able to see that same “yesterday” report but for a whole week or month instead. After all, I’m not as concerned with daily numbers as I am with monthly numbers.

I’d also like to see some further integration with other Yahoo properties. (If you hadn’t heard, Yahoo recently bought MyBlogLog.) It’s doing a great job of tracking my YPN clicks, but how much cooler would it be if I could have it show my revenue too? What about ad spending on overture? Can you tie those together and show me a net profit/loss for the site?

I’m not sure exactly what the pro service offers, but these would be some killer features!

What changes would you like to see with MyBlogLog? What do you think of the service? What features would you add?

April 10th, 2007