Off-domain placements

An off-domain placement is an original article published on someone else’s site, chosen because that site can rank for a query your own domain cannot win yet. Practitioners call this parasite SEO. BirchSeek does not use that phrase in the product, but it is the same thing, and you should know that before deciding whether to use it.

This page is longer than the other integration pages on purpose. Placements carry a kind of risk the rest of the product does not, and most of that risk lands on somebody who never agreed to it.

This is the opposite of syndication

BirchSeek already cross-posts to dev.to, Hashnode and Medium. Those connectors refuse to run until your article is live on your own site, and they send that URL as the canonical, so the copy can never outrank the original.

A placement inverts every part of that:

	Syndication	Off-domain placement
The original lives	on your site	nowhere else — this is the original
Canonical	points home, mandatory	none, and the publisher refuses one
What should rank	your page	the host’s copy
Appears in your Search Console	yes, your page does	never
Can you delete it	the copy, usually	usually not

You can hold two dev.to connectors on one API key, one in each group. That looks like a mistake and is not; they behave in opposite ways and BirchSeek keeps them as separate types so that one wrong checkbox can never turn a syndicated copy into an uncanonicalised one.

What Google’s policy actually says

Everything in this section is Google’s policy, not ours, and it moves. It was last read against Google’s own pages on 30 August 2026. The links go to the primary sources so you can check whether it has moved again since.

In March 2024 Google announced a site reputation abuse policy, enforced from May 2024, aimed at third-party content hosted on an authoritative site largely to exploit that site’s ranking signals. The current text lives in Google’s spam policies. Enforcement has hit large publishers: reporting through late 2024 named Forbes Advisor, CNN Underscored, Fortune Recommends and WSJ Buy Side among the sections that lost their rankings. We have no independent view of those cases beyond that reporting, and none of the numbers attached to them are ours.

The part that matters most to you came later. On 19 November 2024 Google expanded the policy so that the violation stands regardless of first-party involvement or oversight of the content (Google’s announcement). That closed the defence publishers had been using: “we edited it, so it isn’t really third-party”.

BirchSeek therefore never asks whether a host’s editor reviewed your piece, and never treats a host’s approval as making a placement safe. If you see anything in this product implying otherwise, it is a bug. What we ask about instead — whether the topic is native to what the host publishes, whether you have real standing there, whether the piece sits in the host’s own URL space — comes from Google’s own list of things that are not violations: forums and user-generated content, editorial columns and opinion pieces, wire service content, syndicated news.

How it is enforced is changing, and we will not pretend otherwise. The policy has been enforced by manual action since 2024: a human reviews the section, the action lands in the host’s Search Console, and the host can file a reconsideration request. On 30 August 2026 Google changed how those actions apply in the European Economic Area (Google’s announcement, and Search Engine Land’s report): a host in the EEA is still issued the manual action and still sees it in Search Console, but its effect is not applied to searchers inside the EEA, while it continues to apply to searchers outside it. Google’s description of the EEA case is one of separating the affected section in its systems so that it comes to rank on its own merits, which is an algorithmic treatment rather than a manual one.

Read that as the honest state of play: whether a purely algorithmic version exists elsewhere is contested, the claims that it shipped with a 2025 spam update are not ones we can substantiate, and the position above is what Google’s own pages said on the date at the top of this section. None of it changes what BirchSeek does. Every check we run is about the piece’s merits, not about evading a detector, so a wider algorithmic rollout would change this page and nothing else.

Five things that are true and unpleasant

The penalty lands on the host, not on you. A site reputation abuse manual action is usually partial: it hits the section or URL pattern hosting the content, not the whole domain. It arrives in the host’s Search Console, which you cannot see. You are asking a third party to carry your risk, and they did not agree to that.

Recovery is not restoration. The remedies Google accepts — noindex the pages, remove them, convert them to genuine first-party content — permanently drop those URLs from the index. Getting a manual action lifted does not bring the traffic back. An actioned placement is a total loss, not a suspension. Do not respond by moving the content to a subdomain: Google treats that as circumvention, and BirchSeek will never suggest it.

We usually cannot delete it. Once a host publishes your piece, taking it down is their decision. For a hand-over target we have no account at all.

A competitor can report you. Google documents that spam report submissions can trigger a manual action review. A visibly off-topic placement is more exposed than a purely crawler-driven model would suggest.

We cannot measure it. Search Console reports on your property. A placement is not on your property, so it produces no impressions, no position, no CTR, and nothing on the Performance screen. It also never triggers a decline-based refresh, because there is no decline for us to see. The only feedback that exists is BirchSeek’s own periodic rank check, and every screen labels it as that rather than as traffic data.

What it costs

A placement consumes one of your 30 monthly articles, the same as any other. If the host declines your pitch, or publishes it and is later actioned, that article produced nothing and left no asset on a domain you control.

Whether a declined or deindexed placement should refund quota is an open product question. We have not settled it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: the outcome is unobservable from inside BirchSeek, so an automatic refund would be guesswork dressed as accounting. If this happens to you, contact us.

The volume cap, and why it protects you

Off-domain placements are off by default. When you switch them on, you also set a 30-day cap: four by default, ten at the very most, and the ceiling is not configurable.

That cap is there for you, not for the hosts. Scaled content abuse is a separate Google policy, and it attaches to whoever produced the content — you. A 30-article plan spent largely on third-party hosts is exactly the bulk pattern it describes. The cap is what keeps this feature from turning your account into that pattern.

Which hosts BirchSeek can reach

Honestly: one, automatically. This section states why for each of the obvious candidates, because “not built yet” and “cannot be built” are very different answers and you deserve the real one.

Host	Status	Why
dev.to	Automatic	Articles live at dev.to/<user>/<slug> — the host’s own URL space. It has a real write API. Its links were checked against rendered HTML and were dofollow at the time of writing. Only for content a developer reading dev.to would genuinely want; see below.
Hashnode	Not a placement host at all	Your posts live on yourname.hashnode.dev or your own domain, never in hashnode.com’s URL space. They inherit none of Hashnode’s authority, so the entire mechanism is absent. It is a fine syndication target and is offered as one.
Medium	Structurally unsuitable	Medium’s API can create posts but cannot list or update them, and it has stopped issuing integration tokens and accepts no new integrations. Create-only is catastrophic here: a refresh would post a second copy rather than updating the first, and the host copy is the asset.
LinkedIn	Impossible, not unbuilt	The Posts API’s article type has no body field. There is no way to send the text of an article through it.
Reddit	Not offered	Reddit’s developer terms require a commercial agreement for a monetised product. Separately, posting marketing content to a subreddit you have no standing in is the fastest route to a ban, and it would not be defensible even if the API allowed it.
Substack	No write API	Same reason it is unsupported for your own site — see Substack.
Stack Exchange	Wrong shape	Answers are not articles. An answer written to rank rather than to answer is exactly what their community removes, and rightly.

Everything else is a hand-over: BirchSeek prepares a submission packet and you send it to an editor yourself. That is not a limitation we are apologising for. Most high-authority publications prohibit or restrict automated posting, and the honest product prepares the piece rather than faking an API to make the flow look finished.

Only dev.to’s link attributes were verified against rendered HTML. Where this page says nothing about another host’s rel values, that is because we have not checked, not because they are fine.

What dev.to asks of you

dev.to’s own terms ask users to “make a good-faith effort to share content that is on-topic, of high-quality, and is not designed primarily for the purposes of promotion or creating backlinks”, and to disclose affiliate links. That is the same test Google applies, written by the host. A placement that fails it gets removed and takes your account with it.

How it works in BirchSeek

Everything below lives on one screen: Placements, in the sidebar under Connectors.

1. Turn placements on for the project, and set your 30-day cap. Nothing is discovered until you do. The switch asks you to tick four things first — including that the penalty lands on the host and that a host’s editorial review is not a defence — because turning this on is the decision that unlocks everything else. Turning it off again asks nothing; friction belongs where the risk is.

2. Curate hosts. A scan suggests domains it saw in your SERPs; nothing suggested can be used. You approve a host by answering six questions: does content sit in the host’s own URL space, what kind of publication is it, how well does your topic fit it, what standing do you have there, how does a piece get onto it, and what do its terms say. A host you have not answered for cannot produce an opportunity, and a host whose audience has no interest in your topic can never be approved at all. If a host is to be posted to automatically, its terms have to say so in as many words: an unread “maybe” is refused, both when you approve the host and again at the moment of publishing. A host you have already placed on cannot be deleted — block it instead, which stops anything new without erasing the record of where your published pieces went.

   Nobody at BirchSeek can answer these for you, and we will not. Your standing on a host and whether your topic is native to it are the two things that decide whether a placement is defensible, and they are exactly the two we cannot observe. The form tells you, before you save, which answers are blocking approval and why.

3. Placement opportunities appear in Keywords, badged “Off-domain placement”, only for phrases your own site declined — if the SERP is weak enough for you to win it, or Search Console already puts you within position 30, BirchSeek recommends an ordinary article instead and never both. Where Search Console has no position for the phrase at all, the opportunity says so: all we established is that you are not on page one, and the screen does not pretend otherwise.

4. The article is written differently. It cites outward more, links back to you at most once (never in the introduction or conclusion, never with commercial anchor text), and carries no call-to-action. Every verified claim is rendered into the body as a ## Sources block, so the editor reading your piece can check the evidence without leaving it. A host strips our frontmatter and mangles anything footnote-shaped, so a citation carried in metadata would reach nobody; the in-body block is the only form that survives the trip.

5. The publish gate asks more than usual. You write, in your own words, why this host’s audience wants the piece — not why you want the ranking — and you tick four separate acknowledgements. Neither an automatic gate nor an agent connected over MCP can do this for you: a placement is refused unless a person approves it in BirchSeek, whatever the project’s gates are set to. An agent can see placement opportunities; it cannot start one or publish one.

6. After it ships, a daily check records whether it is still there, where it ranks, and what rel its link to you carries. That observation is dated everywhere it is shown, because a host can go site-wide nofollow overnight.

Refreshes

BirchSeek never schedules an automatic refresh for a placement, and this is deliberate. Every publisher’s contract is “probe first, and update in place on a hit” — a contract we cannot honour on property we do not control. A probe that misses creates a second public post on someone else’s domain; a probe that hits rewrites a piece an editor accepted in a specific form.

You can still schedule a refresh by hand from the calendar, and the dialog says the same thing there rather than only here. If you do, understand that it may duplicate the piece or silently rewrite an accepted one, that it claims a fresh article from your quota for a delivery that may be impossible, and that you will be asked for the four acknowledgements again before anything ships.

If you decide not to use this

That is a completely reasonable answer, and the product works exactly as before. Placements are off until you turn them on, and turning them off again stops all discovery immediately. Existing placements stay where they are — we cannot remove them for you.