Published:  16th Feb 2015

How To Find Parasites (Satellite Sites), Web 2.0s, and Social Platforms For SEO Within YOUR Niche

Finding Parasites For SEO

How To Find Parasites (Satellite Sites) Which Work Within YOUR Niche

Up until now the parasite/satellite sites/web 2.0/social platform guides out there have been pretty vague on how to find and leverage parasite specifically for YOUR niche. That's really because there was no tool that allowed you to do this easily. One of SERPWoo's built in features is the SERP Sightings, which we will leverage to quickly see if a domain is being utilized as a parasite - and this is most important - WITHIN YOUR NICHE.

A random popular parasite is great, but if there are a dozen people already utilizing that domain within your niche, it's going to be useless unless you can find others which are not as saturated, so the key is to quickly find parasites within a couple of clicks and add them to your list of sites to utilize.

YouTube.com Parasite/Satellite Example
Youtube Being Utilized As Parasite For A Casino

What SEOs call Parasites (Satellite Sites/Barnacle SEO in White Hat SEO terms) are website which SEOs create profiles or subdomains/subpages on and leverage the authority of the root domain for their own benefit.

A very well known example of a parasite is Youtube.com. Due to the authority and power of Youtube.com, SEOs create profiles and videos on the site, and rank it for major money terms which then funnel traffic to their end website or tell the user viewing the video to visit a specific site.

The key is you are ranking that video or parasite on a web 2.0/social site which can rank high in the SERPs you are going after.

Now what SERPWoo allows you to do is cut down what would normally take hours into mere minutes, if done correctly, to find tons of parasites already being utilized within your niche.

So let's dive in:

1. Load up your niche - In order to find parasites within your niche, you need to load up SERPWoo with keywords from within your niche. The more keywords you load, the bigger the net you cast for your findings.

Get started by loading up 100 to 300+ keywords related to the major and minor terms within your niche. To find and organize under the radar keywords, have separate projects for low volume keywords and high volume keywords. In this example we'll use SERPWoo's Keyword Finder Tool to quickly scan for related terms. You can also utilize other keyword tools like SEMRush as well to generate your list of keywords.

Online Casino Search Within SERPWoo's Keyword Finder

What's great about Keyword Finder is that it not only pulls the related terms but more importantly pulls the top 10 websites ranking for that keyword THEN pulls all their keywords they are ranking for.

I will note this - An advanced hack has been found where some people were getting creative and instead of inputing keywords into the Keyword Finder they inputted whole domains. It MAY be possible to do this for domains which you know are utilizing parasites in their SEO strategy - but I'm not condoning downloading all your competitors keywords - if it's even possible.

This had some mixed results but if the domain was somewhat known it would result in outputting all the keywords they are ranking for. You can then simply save them to a new project and continue on - but that's a very advanced technique/hack which probably may not work most of the time - maybe. We might add domain look up in version 2.0 if we get enough feedback that people want that.

Okay now, simply input a main keyword for your niche into SERPWoo's Keyword Finder and select your country of choice. Keyword Finder will then crunch it's data and gather it's data from multiple sources and output as many keywords as possible for your niche. You can then filter keywords by different metrics like amount of sources (I would keep it 1 to 11 for this example), Volume, Competitive Strength, or PPC CPC (Pay-Per-Click Cost-Per-Click). You can also sort by negative, and positive filters (multiple sorting is available by using commas), to get keywords you feel SEOs would utilize in your niche. In our example we are going to use Online Casino for Google.co.uk:

(You may notice I used the positive keyword "online" in the filter since several of the sites were coming back with physical locations.)

2. Add Checked Keywords to A Project. Out of the 2204 I got back 457 Which I then "Checked All", and Pushed Into My "Online Casino - UK" Project. (Note, I've got thousands of keywords loaded up for this niche for a different purpose, so some of those might creep through as we continue, like I said the more keywords you have the more "enlightening" the SERPWoo experience will be for you. 90% of SERPWoo's interface utilizes your keywords at some level, so adding more will mean you'll have a better God Overview of your niche).

Add Keywords To A Project

3. Visit Global Stats - (for those already logged in - direct link: https://www.serpwoo.com/members/stats/). You can go to your specific country/region of attack, in my case I went in further to Google.co.uk to get more specific by clicking on the lefthand menu icon - (direct link: https://www.serpwoo.com/members/stats/country/co.uk/).

4. Open the SERP Sightings data for some of the top domains showing up.

SERP Sightings - Google.co.uk

You will then be taken to each domains' individual SERP Sightings, which IF you did correctly, you will see your keywords in the lefthand menu that are coming up for the domain. This is critical since you loaded up your niche's keywords into different projects within SERPWoo.

As you navigate from a domain's SERP Sightings to another domain's SERP Sightings, you'll be able to see what domains are being utilized for parasiting or are ranking for those terms you've loaded. I'm going to show you some displays of random ones I've found without getting too specific into this particular niche:

WikiHow.com SERP Sightings For Parasite Potential with Online Casinos

^^ Not that great - only 1 result...

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SlideShare.net SERP Sightings For Satallite Site Potential

^^ A little better - this could be a sign that SlideShare.net is a under the radar and not utilized as much as it could be, so it's worth testing out.

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Pinterest.com SERP Sightings For Web 2.0 Profile Potential

^^ For Pinterest.com not so much - but remember the nature of the keyword. Most likely your niche definitely has exposure within Pinterest if you are not targeting a traditionally non-SEO friendly term like "online casinos".

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Youtube.com SERP Sightings For Social Platform Potential

^^ Obviously the big daddy Youtube.com is a go to for every niche, with the right backlinking strategy, you should be able to displace others who are utilizing it as a parasite. Notice in the SERP Sightings you can not only see the keywords in the lefthand sidebar, but they will also show the first 20 or so underneath the actual position they were last seen (in this case we are seeing positions 11-15 and 16-20). Also note that each keyword is clickable, so you can view the keyword's SERPWoo data right from there.

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Yelp.co.uk Parasite SEO Potential

^^ Yelp.co.uk - Mostly physical locations - but imagine if you were in another niche like restaurants, dentists, attorneys, or b2b professional services, you can load up your competitors' brands and keywords and then see their overall coverage and if it's worth outranking them for their own keywords/brands by viewing the data using the SERP Sightings. The potential is literally endless.

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Facebook.com Parasite Potential

^^ Facebook.com also has potential - but like everything it makes sense to see if it's possible. It might work better for traffic leaking in my case rather then the SEO benefits by allowing "online casino" keyword real estate properties (as Eli from BlueHatSEO.com called satellite sites/parasites).

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LinkedIn.com Parasite Potential

^^ Bingo, looking at those keywords carefully, you'd think one of them is definitely out of place for a Linkedin profile. It could be someone is using linkedin.com to parasite for the keyword or it's legitimately the company's linkedin. You can look into what they are doing by clicking on the keyword and viewing the main SERPWoo keyword interface, and studying that link.

With the SERP Sightings you can figure out and go after low hanging fruit, like domains with some keywords but not a lot of saturation OR if you are brazen enough you can setup your own web 2.0 profile on these domain and outrank by doing "SEO" (building more internal links then the profile currently ranking and/or building external links to your new profile using that anchor).

I've purposely showed only KNOWN and BIG Authority properties in order to not completely out people who are utilizing the lesser known properties in these examples. You guys have to do some work ;)

I saw ebay.co.uk and amazon.co.uk ranking for casino keywords as well, which made me think, what if you could create an ebay store, and parasite off of it, by outbound linking to your money site through it - pushing the rankings up of your money site. Essentially you would be using the parasite property as a tier instead of just using it to rank within the SERPs itself. ;)

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The whole purpose of this exercise is to see what's possible within your niche once you've loaded up your keywords and viewed them within the SERP Sightings, but like in the LinkedIn example what if you are utilizing the main SERPWoo keyword interface, how can you learn more. I'm glad you asked that, here is part 2 of hunting for parasites:

Now let's say you didn't find anything specific within the Global Stats or your country's stats, you can utilize the main SERPWoo interface to dig even deeper.

1. Go to one of your main keywords, then utilize the URL Filter to "Alexa Below 20K". Any site worth it's weight as a parasite is going to have an Alexa under 20K. Then press Go.

View Sites With Alexa Below 20K

2. You'll then be show nothing but results with under 20K Alexa. Then start navigating through your keywords until you find some auto-tagged (ORM tagged) cause they are recognized, or you hover over a domain that you think has some good metrics and people might be using it as a parasite. The Filter stays in place as you go through your keywords in order to make hunting easier for you.

Filtered SERPWoo Data

Sidenote: You can further dig into each result by clicking on the external links for different metrics:

Popup Data Window

More sidenotes: Additional 3rd party external links are available, like OpenLinkProfiler.org, Archive.org, MoonSearch and more - All preloaded with the URLs for your convenience:

3rd Party Data

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Obviously the youtube.com and sites that are always in the top of the global stats are great starter choices, but to find the real gems, you've got to use your wit and the serp sightings with keywords loaded, and navigate through the different keywords. As you spot each potential parasite, make a list of them for later exploration. You can even click on the outbound link in the popup data window to go directly to the page and get a quick view, figuring out if it is actually a parasite or just some article on the site talking about your niche.

I also purposely used "online casinos" so I wouldn't expose platforms like patch.com which are currently being utilized for parasites by SEOs. "Online Casinos" is one of the tougher niches to find parasites due to the nature of the business, so domains that normally would allow you to talk about un-regulated markets are most likely going to filter out anything to do with casinos. It's up to you to load your niche's keywords, and find the ones people are utilizing under the radar, and don't forget that Keyword Finder domain trick - it might work to uncover a whole domain's keywords from our 4 data partners a lot better than you think ;)

Stay Frosty!

CCarter

P.S. Using the SERP Sightings you can see more details of a domain that most other sources expose, see below for Patch.com's Alexa:

Patch.com - Alexa Rank Rising

If you notice on this domain, things are looking extremely well for Patch.com so if any opportunity presents itself for traffic or SEO benefits, take it.

On the other side of the spectrum, we were able to spot the decline to rippoffreport.com and other scam reporting sites which we blogged about, which definitely would be of interest to ORMs. SERPWoo allows us to spot additional actions of Google that no one is reporting about...




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