In this post:

1. 'Parasite SEO', the latest installment in the ongoing battle between search engines and web marketers (it's more entertaining than it should be).
2. A feature request becomes a side project (see: Web 1.1) becomes an actual thing.

But first, a walk though the neighborhood:

Source. Pic related.

Me	Do you know who that is? He's from one of your books.
		The Grinch?		Dani
	That is a really good guess, he's also green and looks a lot like The Grinch. Do you remember Yoda from your Jedi Adventures book? That's Yoda, he looks like The Grinch but has really long ears.
		I haven't seen a Christmas Yoda before!
	You're right, The Grinch is a pretty common Christmas character, in Star Wars there really isn't Chr-- ... hmm well Star Wars and Christmas aren't often associated with one another.

It's these kinds of conundrums that make parenting hard: do you lie to your child about the existence of the Star Wars Holiday Special to protect her from it?

Skip ahead if SEO and AI-generated product reviews are old hat.

Recap: SEO

If you're not a web publishing person you may not know what SEO is. Search Engine Optimization is the tailoring of websites to coax search engines to put them near the top. Google et al publish guidelines for getting ranked well and so web publishers often contort their pages to fit the latest guidelines. It's why you see "Key Takeways" (and similar) at the bottom of informational pages you might happen upon (e.g. MontyAtWork's comment here.

SEO itself is boring and dumb and hurts the internet. And so I'd expect myself to prefer to talk about video games and photography and cyber, but I've found myself fascinated by these SEO stories for a couple of reasons:

• It's basically a joust between Google and SEOs where Google sets the rules and the web tries to break them. It's sort of like a CTF or gamebreaking RPG character build.
• There's an inordinate amount of drama. Google seems to change the rules quite often and this burns a lot of small-time publishers. (I'm not unsympathetic toward them, I'm just a bystander who is happy to not be beholden to the whims of Google's business department.)
• AI has been a total wild card. SEOs use AI to generate volumes of meaningless, regurgitated nonsense in order fool lesser algorithms into thinking they have expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (EEAT). Meanwhile, tech companies are adopting AI for search without destroying their existing business processes.

A few notable installments in this saga:

• 03/2023: I learn about SEO, Google Search Console and deindexing.
• 07/2023: Google moves from trying to index the entire web to indirectly telling publishers, "nah, we're not going to index that". Also in this one: using and abusing "long tail" keywords for SEO success.
• 11/2023: Text content in the uncanny valley.
• 12/2023: I try Bing AI search and run into SEO cloaking.
• 06/2024: A precursor to this post, legacy media gets the private equity treatment as Google kills EEAT.
• 08/2024: Additional discussion on Google choosing not to index the whole web.

Recap: AI and sponsored media

From a year ago:

Me

WaPo did a story about a product review site called Reviewed whose parent company is USA Today and/or a media company called Gannett. The tldr is that writers for Reviewed noticed articles published on their site penned by authors they didn't know. The content appeared to them to be extremely generic and SEO-y, hallmarks of AI-generated text.

This wasn't an isolated incident. Legacy newspapers and magazines have outsourced their brands to marketing companies. With brand power comes both consumer confidence and the search ranking equivalent: domain authority.

Parasite SEO

Linked recently in Hacker News was a SEO blogger's post about two media companies that are a bit like AdVon (discussed in the posts above) but different. Rather than work with the 'trusted' media company (or their new private equity owners) to create a marketing offshoot, these companies simply purchase the publications themselves. As such, they don't acquire household names like USA Today or Sports Illustrated but instead get sites with monthly visits in the six and seven figures. Some examples named in the post: Techopedia, ReadWrite, or Business2Community. The latter already sounds fake af, but crucially these sites rank highly in search for certain keywords.

recleudo.com

"We've found evidence to suggest that Finixio's MO is to buy old, high-authority tech sites that aren't as profitable as their owners might like. Then, they leave the site structure and most of the original content up, and simply add new material that's not relevant to the site's original purpose."

It makes some sense that Techopedia would link to crypto sites but plausibility goes out the window when you see online casinos links on a Swedish spaceport initiative or a Welsh history site. Closer to home:

recleudo.com

Like Augusta Free Press, the East Bay Times is a regional paper gone digital: big enough to survive the destruction of local papers that took place in the 2000s, too small to live on its subscribers like the NYT, would be my guess. So like its Shenandoah cousin, and like Forbes and however many other media sites, it has a sponsored content section. And despite being based in San Francisco, where there isn't... that big a Swedish community, it's a Swedish-language page about Swedish gambling laws.

This was apparently not appreciated in Mountain View:

recleudo.com

Since then, Google seems to be catching up to the biggest parasite players and imposing manual penalties sitewide, resulting in big drops in traffic; the Forbes Marketplace playbook may be played out as a result. Google also just rolled out an update to its definition of site reputation abuse that perfectly describes parasite SEO practices: "Site reputation abuse is the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals." Link.

Recleudo's follow-up post discusses how the offending sites illegitimately got back into Google's good graces by showing googlebot one thing and users the other.

Shady business

Source.

So while AdVon seems to predominantly be directing, say, Sports Illustrated readers to phony "Top 10 Hockey Stick" listicles that reap referral money, the companies discussed in the recleudo posts are focused on online casinos and crypto. Because of the varying legal and regulatory issues, this means the associated businesses aren't particularly forthright with their ownership and org chart - until they are looking to hire.

The corporate shell game isn't worth recapping here but it makes the recleudo posts read equally like an SEO tech breakdown and a Hindenburg Research article. Tangent: Hindenburg's Wags Capital post was quite entertaining.


Long ago I posted a feature request to have a mechanism by which webpages could link to one another by topical similarity. The underlying functionality has been going strong since reaching initial operational capacity, but only as a tool internal to my static site generator. If you're viewing this post (url ends with ".../the_outer_web.html" not ".../2024/12/index.html"), an example of this feature is at the bottom under "Related / External".

With some neat front end code by Rob, we showed that the same functionality could be provided to anyone:

Related / internal

Related / external