A large scale parasite seo is actively compramising high authority .edu and .gov sites
Some of the subdomains of high authority .edu and .gov sites have been compromised by a parasite seo campaign which is indexing un-related content and redirect that traffic to affiliate offers. Sites including duke.edu, wayne.edu, and government websites like michigan.gov and ca.gov and few Indian government sites are also hacked and attack to deploy spam content including pdf, html pages, which redirect users to cost per lead offers. Attackers have created or hacked subdomains for these sites and have uploaded pdf and other html web pages. Due to the high authority of these domains, and subdomain created under this domain automatically ranks without any new backlink as the root domain already has enough authority. This is helping the attackers to rank an weird content with adult keywords, or content for high volume keywords like “free instagram followers” or “ai undresser” and porn or casino keywords which are generating millions of impressions, clicks and thus traffic to these domains. These are all organic search visits for illict keywords and pharases. When spam appears on michigan.gov (DR 91) or duke.edu (DR 94), it inherits instant trust and ranking power.
For example the domain michigan.gov is ranking #1 for the keyword “ai undresser”. The subdomain is mienviro.michigan.gov which generated over 22 Million visits to the domain in just 24 hours! The scale of the Michigan.gov attack is massive, with organic traffic spiking dramatically as thousands of spam pages get indexed and rank for competitive keywords.
For instance, ca.gov has over 3,000 compromised pages ranking for spam keywords, generating an estimated 2.1 million monthly visits.
The algorithm can’t distinguish between legitimate government content and spam when both exist on the same trusted domain. And this is the most important reason why such spam content ranks (on a parasite-seo site) without any on-page or off-site SEO efforts!
Sure the traffic to such subdomains will stop when the webmaster of those domains find the loophole or when Google penalizes such domains in coming days!