I had a back-and-forth on Threads where someone pitched this as a quick win:
pick a low-competition keyword
write a Google Doc
publish to the web
link to your site from the Doc
“parasite SEO” your way to page 1
I pushed back that Google Docs often don’t get indexed, and even when they do, those outbound links are typically nofollow. The other person replied with a site:docs.google.com screenshot showing some Docs in the index.
Has anyone tested this?
When you “Publish to the web,” are the links nofollow/redirected in a way that would prevent PageRank from flowing?
Even if a Doc gets indexed, does it have any link equity to pass without internal links or real traffic to that Doc?
How are people getting these indexed in practice if you can’t submit the URLs in GSC?
I'm guessing at best this might help discovery in edge cases, but it’s not a reliable authority strategy compared to publishing on real editorial platforms that allow followed links or have internal linking.
Open to being proven wrong. If you’ve got data, case studies, or reproducible tests, please share. I’d love to see evidence beyond a few one-off indexed Docs.
