In this trailer for The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, host Jim James sits down with Farzad Rashidi, co‑founder of Respona, to demystify the "black art" of backlinks. Farzad explains that Google’s core algorithm treats links from authoritative, relevant sites as votes of popularity, boosting domain authority and search rankings. He illustrates a simple link‑building campaign: appearing as a guest on another podcast, where the host publishes an episode page with a transcription and links back to the guest’s site, thereby earning a valuable backlink. This mutual collaboration model underpins most link‑building strategies and inspired the creation of Respona, a platform that streamlines the entire process—from discovering prospects, gathering contacts, to executing outreach. Farzad shares a rule of thumb: "If it’s easy to get, it’s no good; if it’s hard to get, it’s good," emphasizing the importance of high‑quality links over volume. He also notes that links from social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Quora) are typically tagged as nofollow and carry little SEO weight. The trailer concludes by announcing a full 20‑minute episode to be released soon.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we are going to a place called Rockville, Maryland in America, and we're going to meet Farzad Rashidi, who is a co-founder of a company called Respona. Farzad, you're going to help us to understand the sort of curious black art of backlinks, because link building is something that some of us know a little bit about, and you know a lot more than we do. So I'd love for you to share with us How does Respona help the unnoticed entrepreneur to get noticed?
So the way Google works, the core algorithm of Google is kind of like a spider that crawls the web. And when other relevant websites in your space that contain some authority themselves link back to you, mention you, and talk about you, that's in the eyes of Google is a vote of popularity. And that helps your general domain authority, as we said in the SEO industry, to increase, and that also increases your likelihood from your own website pages to start getting rankings for Google. So let me walk you through an example. One of the simplest examples of a link building campaign, which most SEOs don't even consider it as link building, is what I'm doing right now— being a guest on another podcast. Believe it or not, that is an SEO strategy. Let me take it step by step. So when I come on as a guest on the show, Your website is going to put up the episode with the transcription and potentially links to Respona, ultimately mentioning me and the company that I come from. So when Google crawls that new page that you put on your site and sees, okay, Jim is a smart person with— carries a level of authority and is vouching for Respona. He's had their founder on the page and is linking to their website and is mentioning them, is talking about them. So that is another vote of popularity. And we get value and you also get a link to your website that also helps your search pages to have a higher chance of getting up into search results. So kind of strategies like this where you're basically building mutually beneficial collaborations, kind of the basis for any sort of link building campaign. And that's kind of something that led to the creation of Responder that helped us sort of streamline that entire process from discovery to finding the right person, getting the contacts and outreach. There's a simple rule of thumb. If it's easy to get, it's no good. If it's hard to get, is good. So anybody can go on Twitter and Facebook and just post a bunch of things and link back to their site. So Google never prioritizes them so that they developed a tag called nofollow back in, I guess, 10, 20 years ago, that all of these social media user-generated content adds forum links, Reddit, you know, Quora, all sorts of social media, and none of them actually carry any sort of weight.
Now, this was just a trailer for a full 20-minute show. The show will be dropping into your feed in the next day or so, so do look out for it and do enjoy it, share it, and review it. Thanks for listening to this trailer of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.
