Have you noticed in the past few months that Reddit seems to pop up in almost every single one of your Google search results? Whether you’re looking for product reviews, travel tips, or life advice, those distinctive Reddit threads are almost always there on either page one or two – though it’s usually the former. This isn’t just Google’s algorithm being extra friendly to Reddit – there’s actually a story behind it.
Unfortunately, opportunistic spammers have noticed Reddit’s stellar search rankings as well and they’ve been flooding it with fake posts and insincere advice. Their end goal is simple: money.
But how did we get here? Didn’t Reddit used to be a fun place where you could go to connect with like-minded people? What happened?
Let’s talk about it.
When did Reddit start dominating search results? 📆
As you can see, Reddit’s traffic started rapidly climbing in the fall of 2023. From the looks of it, it appears almost as if someone had pushed a button or switched a lever to increase its visibility in Google’s search results.
Well – spoiler alert – that’s exactly what happened. In November of 2023 Google rolled out what became known as the “hidden gems” update. While they only mentioned the word “forums” once in their announcement about the update, it was clearly designed to give more visibility to discussion-based content.
Many forum sites benefited, but the two biggest gainers were Quora and Reddit. You can see both of their traffic started to pick up about a month after Google’s announcement:
The $60 million dollar deal 🤝
As mentioned, traffic on all forum sites began to rise. However, Reddit was clearly the leader of the pack.
Both Google and Reddit realized they had a mutually beneficial relationship and ended up signing a $60 million dollar annual deal in February of 2024. 1
At its core, it was a data deal. Google gained access to Reddit’s Data API, providing them with real-time, structured content from one of the internet’s largest discussion platforms. On the Reddit side, they were able to integrate new AI-powered capabilities using Google’s Vertex AI. This enhanced their native search functionality. 2
Google also made a commitment to develop “more content-forward displays of Reddit information” across their products.
By Q3 2024, Reddit’s number of daily active users had skyrocketed to 97.2 million, marking a stunning 47% year-over-year increase. 3
Source: statista.com
It became the third most visible site in Google’s ecosystem. 4
For its part, Google has denied allegations that they’ve been favoring Reddit in search results – pointing to the increased traffic of other forum sites (including Quora) as evidence that “it’s not only Reddit.” 5
Whether you take Google’s denials at face value or not, one thing is for certain: Reddit’s increased visibility has had far reaching ramifications and not all of them have been positive.
👉 You might also like: 120+ Spectacular SEO Stats: Your Ultimate List of Search Engine Optimization Statistics
Behind the curtain: The Reddit parasite SEO playbook 🎭
“Reddit is the most human place on the internet.”
That’s what Reddit advertises to the world. The underlying message is that it is a place of authenticity.
In the day and age of AI tools, Reddit knows that many humans are hungry for real human interaction. They want conversations and advice from fellow humans and not a string of text produced by ChatGPT or some other LLM bot.
But does Reddit actually deliver on that promise?
Partially.
The advice you’ll find on Reddit is still coming from other humans in many cases, but the conversations in which that advice is given aren’t as authentic as they might have been in the pre-hidden-gems-update, pre-Google deal era.
Here’s what’s actually happening behind the scenes…
The artificial conversation factory 💬
The Reddit manipulation game begins with online marketplaces like Z2U. These websites sell established Reddit accounts that aspiring “entrepreneurs” can purchase for relatively short money. Some of the more valuable accounts with longer histories and high karma can get pricey, but most are fairly affordable:
They can then use one of those accounts to post a strategic question addressing a pain point or need that other genuine users might have.
For example, let’s say you’re in the r/drones subreddit. You can post a question about looking for a drone:
On the surface, nothing seems unusual there. It’s just a normal person asking for recommendations.
However, if you’re the owner of multiple aged Reddit accounts, you can log out of the account that you used to ask for the recommendation, clear your cache, use a VPN to change your IP address, and open up a different browser to log into another one of your accounts. You then leave a recommendation for the other user (which is really just yourself):
The recommendation is actually a cloaked link. It redirects to a page that reviews drones, with each of the drones being an affiliate link to Amazon:
Every time someone clicks any one of those links and buys a drone, you get a commission. With drones costing hundreds to thousands of dollars, each sale could net you a handsome commission.
To magnify the chances that your recommendation stays high up in the original thread, you can repeat the process. Log out, clear your cache, change your IP, and log into another one of your aged accounts using a different browser. From there you either upvote the original comment or add additional comments to support the recommendation.
Ultimately, the goal is to use this manufactured conversation as a form of social proof to drive traffic back to the page where you have the affiliate links.
The thing is that this manipulation doesn’t just stay within the four walls of the subreddit. Google’s algorithm picks up on the social proof as well. And if you get lucky (which isn’t that hard with Reddit’s high visibility), your post will hit the jackpot: landing on the first page of Google for “best drones” – an incredibly profitable keyword position.
This amplifies the traffic – and the profits! 💰
Where’s the proof? 🤨
All of what I just laid out sounds rather sinister. If you’re a skeptic like me, you might be saying to yourself:
“Okay, that sounds nice and all, but do you actually have any proof this manipulation is happening?”
You’re going to hate this answer, but it’s both “no” and “yes.”
Here’s what I mean:
The description of the multi-account strategy I gave is not the only variation of parasitic SEO you’ll see on Reddit. Often times you might also see a genuine recommendation question being asked and the manipulation strategy only kicks in for the responses. In all likelihood, that’s probably what happened with the “best drone” example I gave.
If you check the user activity of the person who posted the recommendation request, it appears rather normal. However, if you check the user activity of the money-making commenter (the one with the top reply), it reveals a stream of similar replies in other subreddits with profit potential:
It seems like the moderators of most of the subreddits the account posted to realized that this is a parasite account and deleted the comments. The only non-deleted comment also reads like it was written by AI.
So, while I can’t explicitly prove that the original commenter and the top responder are in fact the same person, what is clear, is that the latter is not looking to use Reddit as a way to connect with fellow humans. It was created for one sole purpose: to redirect traffic to affiliate links or to external sites with affiliate links.
Having said that, even if the top responder is just some Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, you don’t have to look very far to find proof that collusion between accounts is happening.
The grassy knoll Redditor 👀
Looking at the original drone thread, all you have to do is go one comment down from the top responder to find evidence of a multi-account conspiracy. That account also left a link. On the surface, it’s a link to another subreddit thread:
However, click through to that subreddit thread and you’ll find a comment loaded with links that all lead to the same drone affiliate site. You’ll also notice that the referring user and the account posting the links to the drone affiliate site are not the same:
Do I know whether this is one person using two separate accounts or two separate people working together using their own accounts?
No, I do not know. But does it matter at the end of the day?
The point stands: these are not authentic accounts interested in making Reddit “the most human place on Earth.”
How prevalent is parasite SEO on Reddit? 🦠
If your next thought is, “big deal, this was just one example with drones, how do I know this is happening at scale?”
That’s a fair question to ask. The simple answer is: you don’t.
The people who do this aren’t exactly filing quarterly reports. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t make some educated guesses.
First, it’s important to note that opportunistic individuals were already using creative SEO tactics even prior to the hidden gems update and the Google deal. For example, the individual below used a direct match keyword strategy to hijack the :
So while it’s tricky to get exact numbers on parasite SEO, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Reddit’s explosive growth over the past year hasn’t attracted more of this kind of behavior.
Even if we assume that the level of activity remained at a constant ratio of parasite SEO activity to genuine posting then there would still be an overall net increase. This is due to both the rise in organic traffic (mentioned earlier) and the increased number of keywords Reddit began ranking for:
- Between the spring 2023 and summer of 2024, Reddit saw a 207% increase in total ranking keywords in the US, adding 110 million new keywords to its arsenal. 6
- For page one queries, the site experienced a 322% increase over the same period. 7
- And in those coveted top three positions? A 266% boost, netting Reddit an additional 7.2 million keywords. 8
Do you think all of that increased visibility was shrugged off by clever SEO professionals…or do you think they took advantage of it? You tell me.
Why Reddit SEO manipulation is here to stay 📈
Unfortunately, the problems I outlined here won’t be meaningfully addressed anytime soon – if ever. For a website who’s very foundation was built on hundreds of fake profiles, perhaps it’s just par for the course. And if you were hoping that something was going to happen as a result of Google’s recent manual strike against other parasite SEO abusers, you can keep hoping.
There are two main reasons for why change might not come soon:
- Addressing the issue in a meaningful way is not practically feasible.
- There are no real alternative options for Google.
Regarding the first point, unlike the sites Google took action against, Reddit is a lot more decentralized.
With Forbes, CNN, Fortune, etc, there are content teams that can be identified as intentionally using a parasite SEO strategy to abuse Google rankings. It’s easy to point the finger and say “Hey, you, we see what you’re doing and we’re going to punish you for it.”
On Reddit, you have over 100,000 active subreddits with thousands of individual moderators who are not actual Reddit employees. On top of that you have more than one billion individual users.
Who among them is using parasite SEO tactics?
It’s not identifiable in the same way that you can identify an editorial team behind a specific website.
If Google was to take some kind of action, it would have to manually punish individual subreddits. But making those assessments would require way too much manpower.
The other option would be to reverse the hidden gems update – or at least the part that bumped the search traffic of forum websites. That’s unlikely to happen though because no viable alternative for surfacing “organic human content” exists.
The reality is that whenever Google starts favoring something – whether it’s particular types of websites or SEO methods – opportunists jump on it. This means we’re stuck with both Reddit and Google being the way they are. It’s also probably why Google has been steadily losing market share because users are simply looking for better alternatives.
What do you think about this whole Reddit situation? Do you see it being resolved? Did I miss something? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
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- https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/reddit-partners-google-new-data-sharing-deal/708268/ ↩︎
- https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/expanded-reddit-partnership/ ↩︎
- https://www.fastcompany.com/91219054/reddit-stock-price-today-record-high-rddt-profit-user-growth ↩︎
- https://www.sistrix.com/blog/reddit-domain-analysis/ ↩︎
- https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/beyond-reddit-and-quora-google-hidden-gems-update-forums-surge/ ↩︎
- https://lbbonline.com/news/reddits-serp-dominance-and-what-it-means-for-your-brand ↩︎
- https://lbbonline.com/news/reddits-serp-dominance-and-what-it-means-for-your-brand ↩︎
- https://lbbonline.com/news/reddits-serp-dominance-and-what-it-means-for-your-brand ↩︎
