Parasite hosting

Parasite hosting, in computing, is the process of hosting a website on someone else's server without their consent, generally for the purpose of search engine benefit.

Mechanism

Search engines such as Google rank search results based on the relevance to the search query and, importantly, an importance rating, such as PageRank, which is based in part on a link analysis of the web. Therefore, one strategy for increasing the search engine traffic to a website is to place a link or redirect on a highly-valued domain on which one can host a webpage. Educational institutes (including .edu domains), as well as some social news sites (for instance, Digg and Reddit), often allow users to create webpages, thus creating an opportunity to parasite host a webpage whose sole purpose is to increase traffic to a given target, without regard for the hosting domain's policies or intended use of the exploited space.