ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Most link building still runs on domain authority, and Gaetano DiNardi says the game has completely changed.
In this episode of the BuzzStream Podcast, I talk with Gaetano DiNardi, a B2B SaaS marketing advisor who has worked with SEMrush, Gong, Cognism, and many others.
We dig into his Search Engine Land article on why the traditional link building model doesn't work anymore, how link vendors price and sell links, and what to do instead of buying them.
We also get into why citations aren't the same as recommendations in AI search, the common-sense rubric Gaetano uses to judge a link, and why he thinks we're in the "dark SEO" era.
🔑 Key Takeaways:
- Don't brute-force a category you don't belong in. If AI believes you don't belong, it can pull content from your page, recommend your competitors, and still give you the citation.
-Citation rate is the new domain authority. Low-tier guest posts can lift citation rate without moving recommendation rate.- Judge links with common sense, not SEO metrics: real business, real brand, aligned traffic geography, and users who can actually complete tasks.- Reverse-engineer the sources of influence for your category: Gartner pages and reviews, podcasts, affiliate sites, co-marketing, and YouTube.- We're in the dark SEO era. Google is more of a validation engine than a discovery engine, so more organic performance shows up as branded and direct traffic.
⏰ Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:44 – What prompted you to write your Search Engine Land article?
04:30 – Are links still important, or is it the brute-force, quantity-over-quality approach that no longer works?
07:15 – How do you measure relevance and authority for lower-tier links, and are they even worth getting in the AI era?
11:36 – How do you know how many quality links you need, and are you benchmarking against competitors?
14:01 – Are you using AI prompt tracking as your main goal instead of organic or direct traffic?
15:48 – How does link building connect to AI exposure, and does ranking higher in search mean showing up more in AI?
18:30 – What is "credible context," and how are brands building it?
20:44 – What's to stop someone from scaling out a million guest posts packed with the keywords they want AI to associate with them?
25:03 – What should people be doing instead of buying links?
28:06 – Is there anything we haven't covered that listeners should know?
Guest: Gaetano DiNardi, B2B SaaS Marketing Advisor
Check out ListIQ, our AI-powered media list building tool.
https://www.buzzstream.com/listIQ
See the full transcript:
https://www.buzzstream.com/blog/gaetano-dinardi-podcast/
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