Site reputation abuse
Publishing third-party content on a host site to exploit that site's ranking signals; a Google spam policy violation regardless of…
AlgorithmsRented authority
Parasite SEO
The practitioner term for ranking content on someone else's high-authority domain instead of your own, now largely covered by Google's site reputation abuse policy.
In full
Tactics range from clearly abusive — buying a subfolder on a news site for gambling affiliate content — to grey areas such as publishing on Medium, LinkedIn or marketplace platforms. The distinguishing question Google poses is whether the content is closely related to the host site's purpose and produced with genuine involvement, or simply borrowing its signals. Since 2024 enforcement, the tactic carries real risk for the host site as well as the operator.
Example
An operator pays a university publication for a subdirectory hosting product comparisons unrelated to the institution.
Related terms
Google spam policies
Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword…
Manual action
A demotion or removal applied by a human reviewer at Google for a spam policy violation, reported in Search Console with a reconsideration…
Guest posting
Writing articles for other publications; legitimate as an audience and authority tactic, but a link spam violation when done at scale…
Expired domain abuse
Buying an expired domain and repurposing it to host unrelated low-value content in order to inherit its accumulated ranking signals.