Parasite SEO is the practice of publishing content on high-authority third-party domains to rank quickly in search results, bypassing the time needed to build your own domain authority.
The cases presented within, are closer to a site reputation abuse case or as we coin it, internal parasite SEO. To understand this concept, we’ll talk about parasite SEO in general with an example.
In a parasite SEO scenario, unethical actors will leech onto an authoritative platform e.g. Forbes, CNN, Medium, (Wirecutter by New York Times??) and even governmental websites) to publish content, leverage the authority of the publishing platform/domain, and monetize their actions for profit.
Let’s see a more recent parasite SEO example in September with our southern neighbours.
California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing pulling in 22 million organic inbound traffic in September 2025
The meetings subdomain for the CTC in California was pulling a whooping 22 million estimated organic monthly traffic in September(Ahrefs screenshot below). The subdomain in question is https://meetings.ctc.ca.gov/.
Somehow, access to this high authority governmental website was established, followed by publication of hundreds of URLs.
In this case someone was cashing out on ‘free shein gift card codes’, ‘amazon gift cards’, adult content, amongst others. Short-lived, but life-changing nonetheless for some.
For the CTC case, there’s definitely exploitation actions which are illegal.
It doesn’t compare to New York Times selling you deodorants through its Wirecutter platform (deemed unethical or at least scrutinized by many in the SEO industry), but you get the idea.
The takeaway is that parasite SEO is defined as publishing content and generating significant buyer intent traffic for pages that are NOT genuinely central to a website topic.
Whether it’s done through a third party online platform or internally(like we’re about to see here in Alberta), questions should be raised!
What Does Internal Parasite SEO look like in Alberta?
1) Utility companies: We see you ATCO Energy (Home Services)
As I was googling around for a client in the trades, habitually for myself and many, I’ll skim through the ads and see the organic SERP(search engine results pages aka the blue links), I was slightly baffled to see ATCO ranking in the top 10 results or the first page for a non-utility search keyword.
Routinely, I plugged their website on Ahrefs Site Explorer(an marketing tool) to find in Site Structure a dedicated /home-services/ folder within their URL architecture which looked like this:
The /home-services/ folder draws inbound organic an estimated by Ahrefs, 5157 monthly visitors from Alberta. This visiting traffic consists of Albertans with buying intent.
In short, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), professionals, or trades dream to get this traffic. SEO agencies too (for their clients)!
Apparently, back 2021 ATCO acquired Rumi.ca and this is what Marshall Wilmot the president of ATCO said in the press release:
“Rümi is the right solution at the right time for homeowners, who are looking to create happiness in their homes,” – read the full release here.
Like the service industry needed more dilution from a utility company and now it’s whole.
When KPIs, EBITDA, or stock price enters the chat, corporate responsibility is out of the window. The lemon stand sponsorship isn’t as symbolic as it used to be.
Nevertheless, organic traffic is steadily increasing, likely prompting less traffic for SMBs in the future.
The takeaway is that ATCO Ltd. a C$5.14 billion company is draining traffic and customers from hard working Alberta businesses and most likely, many of these SMBs are their utility clients.
With that said, ATCO is hiring/subbing out to local companies to do the work. But it comes with a cost which we’ll talk about below.
Let’s see how home improvement retailers are leveraging their site reputation.
2 ) Retail Companies: Home Depot
Home Depot is a huge home improvement retailer pulling around 3.2k organic traffic in Calgary alone with the URL: stores.homedepot.ca/ab/calgary/home-services/. Again similar to ATCO, this is valuable buyer intent traffic a.k.a Albertans looking to spend money on a home improvement service.
Additionally, the nested pages under this Home Depot’s Home Services (think plumbing, cleaning, tile installation etc) are pulling another ~2k buyer intent, organic search traffic.
I haven’t seen Home Depot installation crews driving around recently, have you?
Another organic ~5000 searches to brand squatting companies instead of your local e.g. plumber or tile setter. The markup cost is probably sweet without much sweat.
Edmonton, Red Deer, Lethbridge and even Airdrie aren’t any better. SMB in Edmonton lose around 2,534 organic traffic per month.
A rough estimate, is that Albertan businesses are losing around ~20k organic traffic monthly, to behemoth retailers such as Home Depot. For the uninformed, a retailer that gets most likely north of a billion in retails sales for the same province.
3) Online review platforms: Home Stars
I’ll caveat that this could lean more towards natural growth to a platform and is a much less in severity than the two examples above.
HomeStars is a great community in of itself, and I always recommend our clients to pay and get listed there. It’s an additional brand building platform that mirrors Google Business Profile and frequently shows up in your local profile along with Google, Facebook or Yelp reviews. It’s a good reminder that brand building shouldn’t be only on Google.
They vet the companies before listing, and that’s good enough to ensure that Calgarians are getting legit services.
More recently (at least to my knowledge), they’re aggressively selling leads to trades. The same trades pay hundreds of $$ to get listed there.
If you visit: https://www.homestars.com/handyman-services/handyman-pros/calgary-alberta the listicle is pushed below the fold, and their intake form is above the fold for the sole purpose of up-selling existing clients.
Yes, nothing wrong with that, except that many domains are asked to link out to Homestars with an accreditation badge and pass domain authority back to HomeStars which after is exploited to out-rank the same businesses that it’s charging listing fees.
And if you didn’t know, Better Business Bureau (BBB) and more rigorous trades associations such as the Alberta Allied Roofing Association pass on leads to listed members for FREE!
IMHO, HomeStars should stay true to it’s mission of vetting and maintaining its platform rather than charging for lead generation which should come as an added feature to paying members.
Pros & cons of the Organic Authority Arbitrage + Sub-work
Pros:
- Presumed safety net: with a big brand customers assume there’s accountability if the job goes wrong.
- Vetting (in-theory): they claim to check and vet their contractor network.
- No shopping around: for folks that hate getting many quotes.
Cons:
- Pricing: Albertans are paying for an unnecessary middleman… Multi billion dollar companies that is.
- Workmanship quality: as these aren’t in-house crews, the contractor could be great or could be mediocre to bad.
- Finger pointing: diluted accountability when something goes wrong.
- No relationship: you probably never see that contractor again.
As of December 2025, ATCO Home Services Google Business Profile hoards around 295 reviews at an average of 4.5 out of 5. That’s an average of what you would find with local contractors in general.
There’s a toll free number and no address on the profile. There’s some great reviews there, but we’ll share two to assert some of the cons we laid out above:
On the other hand, Home Depot’s Google Business Profiles are a mess. Aside from their retail profiles they have the Home Services GBProfiles – total of 16 profiles in Calgary alone(without the 8 ‘Tool Rental Profiles’, ‘kitchen remodeling’ etc). Each has an address so assuming there’s somewhere you can complain regarding a service.
Compared to ATCO, Home Depot’s reviews are all over the place. Decision making based on customer feedback is just unattainable.
With not many reviews for HomeDepot’s Home Service profiles, they’re sitting around 4.0 average. Nothing promising though.
Apparently Ralph L., thinks that Home Depot’s vetting process failed him.
How do local trades in Calgary feel about competing with ATCO & Home Depot?
We emailed dozens of various trades (two per trade) to get their feedback, after giving some context around this guide.
Michael from Titan Tree Services:
As a successful small business owner, I am grateful for the opportunity to have built a company from the ground up. However, with artificial intelligence eliminating entry-level positions across various sectors and large corporations such as ATCO Energy shifting their focus to dominate local trade industries, I am left wondering what opportunities will remain for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
Rini from CalgaryParging:
When big retail and utility companies pull so much Alberta search traffic to their national sites, it takes work away from the local businesses who actually live and contribute here. Supporting local trades keeps skilled people working and strengthens our community.
Val from MBtile:
I know tile setters that have been staying home because of lack of opportunity.This is outrageous! As if the tiling industry isn’t saturated enough.
Glen from CPR Group:
A while back I had the pleasure of running into and of chatting with a gutter installer who had just finished working in the neighborhood; he was a sub of a sub-contractor of a roofing contractor that has signed up on their platform. You get the tradeoff idea of the cost of service here. It’s an interesting business model, it’s been tried before by other venture capital firms attempting shareholder value creation with not much success, we wish them good luck! Also, just curious to know who covers the liability and labor warranty of the vetted pros ? Asking for a friend.
We’ll populate with more feedback as they come in.
How can Calgary SMBs compete against big brand SEO?
With all that was said above, local businesses in Calgary are quite geared toward SEO and strapped with enough provisions to fight the big brands. Albertan businesses and in particular Calgary based, have probably the most mature SEO ready websites in whole of Canada. A high rate of these SMBs with online exposure, have more than the SEO basics in place.
And I do think that search engine results pages are fair in general. With that said I’ll mention some do’s and don’ts that can help an SMB with much-needed visibility on search:
- Stay way from AI content, or at least AI content without any human effort.
- Write better supporting content to your sales pages aka guides/blog posts. If for any reason someone is advising you not too e.i. ‘blogs are dead’, then show them ATCO’s blog url – https://www.atcoenergy.com/blog.
- Don’t use stock photos. In lieu of jobsite photos, big brands will opt for stock photos. That’s where you can beat them and score an extra point in the search algorithm.
- Continuously grow your back-links to increase domain authority and get referral traffic along the way.
- Participate on social networks showcasing your work, experience and first-hand knowledge.
These sit at the core of the search engine optimization process, and will do wonders assuming you have a technically sound up and running website. I’ve written an in-depth guide with SEO improvements you can do yourself if you don’t have any agency to support you currently or can’t afford one.
I truly believe that SMB owners with first-hand experience can beat an entire SEO agency in rankings, if they had the time to do so.
Answers to Questions that might come up for this topic:
Q. Is parasite SEO or domain legal?
A. Yes it is.
Q. Is this exactly parasite SEO? The domains in question are publishing to their own domain not third party platform.
A. Not exactly. These companies publish to their own domains, not third-party platforms — that’s why we call it “internal parasite SEO”. It likely falls more under Google’s site reputation abuse policy. Here’s Google AI summary for this policy:
- Policy Focus: Google’s policy aims to stop large sites from leveraging authority to rank unrelated, low-value third-party content (e.g., affiliate pages).
- Legitimate Competition: A utility company creating original, quality content for its own new home services is considered legitimate competition, as the content is relevant and self-managed.
- Abuse Definition: The policy distinguishes between genuine business expansion and using a domain as a content farm for external partners seeking to manipulate search rankings.
My belief is that the breach is in the first bullet point. Lead collecting for profit sharing with other contractors that do the job actually, it falls under a performance-based marketing, a form of affiliate or partner marketing. It’s up to search engines to determine whether the content provides value to the user or is it primarily an attempt to manipulate search rankings.
Knowing how trades operate in Alberta, I know my stance.. you can make up your own.
Q. How much organic traffic do Alberta SMBs lose to big brands?
A. Based on our Ahrefs research, Home Depot alone captures approximately 20,000 monthly organic searches across Alberta for home services — traffic that would otherwise go to local contractors.
Q. Does ATCO Home Services or Home Depot use their own crews?
No. Both companies subcontract to local trades, acting as middlemen who collect leads and take a cut of the job.
Q. Should I still list my business on HomeStars?
Yes, but understand the tradeoff. HomeStars now sells leads back to the same businesses paying listing fees. From what trades have shared us, alternatives like BBB and the Alberta Allied Roofing Association pass leads to members for free.
Visibility Drip is a Calgary SEO agency with experts who fights for small businesses to get seen in search — not get buried by big brands.
