Comparing Link Authority: AI vs Search, and how to win at both (Ahrefs x Bazoom)

Okay, we're going live. Great. And let's begin. Start so we can allow attendees to join. Yay. Good luck. Hello. Hello. Welcome everyone and their AI assistants [laughter] to today's webinar. Uh thank you for joining. I see lots of people are filing in right now. Welcome, welcome. If you are joining us from, if this is early morning for you or late in the evening, uh definitely say hi in the chat as well as where you guys are dialing in from. We like to see where you guys are coming from. Hi Daniel, welcome. Hi Robert, hi Adam. Thank you for joining us today. Wow, what a great collection of places people are from. That's awesome. Okay. Uh thank you so much for joining us everyone. Uh without further ado, I think we'll go ahead and get started here so we can start on time. Uh welcome to today's webinar on comparing link authority AI versus search and how you can win at both. In today's webinar, I'm joined here with Tamara, head of SEO at Bazoom. And in the past year, Tamara has been speaking at multiple conferences about AI visibility as well as tactics for link building in both AI as well as traditional search. And Tamara has also worked for hundreds of clients every year for more than five years in Bazoom and she has worked with clients across all kinds of verticals. So you know today's tactics will be covering uh will be based off real experience and real data from working with said clients of of different angles. So it's not um so it's aides from um others who are talking and sharing their findings about what you should be doing to win at AI as well as search and here we we're talking not just from the data what we can see are allows people to get cited more or to get uh higher rankings in search but also what clients seem to get as results based on what tactics are working today. So, um it's a real treat to have tomorrow here with us today to discuss both sides of how we can understand um what is required in terms of link building uh to achieve results uh for your brand to improve their um visibility as well as their performance uh online. So how today's webinar will work is that we will first go through today's webinar content and then uh as we go through the content if you have any questions there is a Q&A function and in your toolbar here for zoom please share your questions there uh and we will go through questions based on uh from most upvoted uh first to to go on down. So, um, definitely if you have any questions, you can ask them in Q&A and if you see a question that you like to get answered first, you can definitely outvote those that you like to see uh us go through uh at the beginning. So, and to answer the question that asks that gets asked very often, yes, today's webinar will be recorded and you can access the replay on our HFS tutorials YouTube channel after today's webinar is over and we'll be sharing the link to that webinar as well as the slides via email uh after in in a couple days. So, without further ado, let us begin today's webinar. Tamara, please take it away. Uh thank you so much Constance and uh hi to everyone. Thank you for watching our webinar from any part of the world you are. Um I'm here in Denmark. It's early morning so uh we're starting fresh and on today's webinar uh we're bringing you some very exciting data. I'm very happy to uh team up with aircrafts on this because they have the best data uh from their uh pool of uh backlink uh sources. So um this data showed us some very exciting things. Uh I've been wondering about this for a while and I know a lot of SEOs are uh curious to know if backlinks still work. We start every year by um you know re-evaluating is SEO dead is link building dead and I'm honestly tired of it and uh I'm happy to have the opportunity to show uh this data and how uh our work at Bazoom actually supported this. So uh we're going to try and answer the uh this uh question. How do backlinks actually correlate with what ranks uh in search and what is cited in AI? Because today it's kind of separate and if they don't correlate the same way, how do we make the strategy that works and through today's uh agenda we will answer these questions through the data set that constants will uh provide and analyze. We will get into some acurfs features that will uh give you the opportunity to test this yourself and apply to your own strategies. And we will finally answer the very infamous questions about DR. Is domain rating still valuable in SER or AI? Uh does it matter at all? And if it does, how does it matter? and um I will be happy to show you uh strategies and frameworks that you can apply in your strategies. So uh let's get started. So uh in 2025 uh we basically shut down the idea that SEO is one scoreboard and uh we've realized that you need to uh work in multiple directions uh because the same effort uh today can create totally different outcomes uh depending on whether you're trying to win in SERs or AI mode AI overviews or the LLM's uh answers and on top of that we are seeing more and more that single layer strategies uh don't seem to be enough. So applying uh like uniformed or or universal strategies and just pushing into only one direction uh probably won't give you as much visibility or success with backlinks. And why is that? Um user discovery changed. So users don't just Google it anymore. They bounce between classic SERs and AI answers today. So you're basically competing in ranking based systems and retrieval answer based systems and they don't seem to reward authority the same way which is the news we are bringing you today. So while uh AI answers uh work on uh answer retrieval mode Google SER and AIO and AI mode still um different uh still evaluate backings in a different way. Um, and this is the mindset we have to uh we have to adapt to today. And uh because our content has two audiences uh humans on Google that still actually read pages uh believe it or or not. And um uh we have the AI uh as the audience that actually summarizes the pages for you. So your job is to cover both and satisfy both sides. Um so although traffic uh AI traffic uh covers uh a tiny portion of uh the overall organic traffic uh we do see that it's exponentially growing year-over-year. So we are in a stage that we need to optimize to uh for the AI but uh Google still uh kind of has uh the dominance over the organic traffic as we can see from the latest data from uh last month. So, uh even though AI is getting more and more popular and uh you it it may seem like you need to uh relocate all of your budgets towards AI visibility, um you still need to optimize for Google traffic. So, um from the business perspective, that uh may sound scary and uh sounds like you need to spend a lot more money. I hear this from a lot of clients. So um this is why we wanted to come up with strategies that that that can cover both in practical and economical ways. So uh a recent ACF study uh interestingly showed that AI tends to site pages that are easy to quote and explain. So blog posts, guides, uh comparisons, uh so it's not only the product pages. So it likes to give some some kind of fresh data and um structural data. So um if your entire strategy is only money pages uh you might not be so visible in AI. So keep that in mind. And we also keep this in mind for the link strategies as well. So both on page and off page and uh into more detail AI overviews um interestingly seem to prefer more brand mentions. Um it seemed like uh AI overviews looks into those uh domain rating and referring domain data as uh constants uh showed you earlier um that the ACF's uh data analysis showed that DR and RD are still important in AI overviews but also ad data as well. So interesting to know for your strategies. Um, and on top of that, most AI mentions of your brand, one come from your own site. So, they usually come from other websites, other authority domains that are signaling. So, this is the game we already know about link building. Um, so I'm not trying to push that link building is back um because we miss the the old the good old SEO, but it's really back because um it turns out it's one of the most important ways to uh build those external signals toward your website. So in 2026 I believe that links are getting a huge comeback as a powerful tool for earning any kind of citations and proof of existence. So uh I will give the mic to uh constants and um let you learn more about the data. Okay. So we're going to swap. Give us a quick second here. Yeah. share them please can shake. Okay. So um so when people ask the question about um back links and domain authority oftent times what they really want to understand is how many back links do I need to build in order or in order to start showing up start getting cited. What is the domain authority required to start appearing in the top 10 results in search or get cited as one of the top URLs in the answers? And how much of like increasing the number of backlinks or increasing the domain authority as a whole will lead to an increase in positions? Does it matter? And um is there any kind of impact? So in order to um try to answer this question, we looked at 3 million top ranking URLs in SERs, 3 million in AI mode, and 3 million in uh AI overviews. Sorry, uh SERs AI mode in AI overview just to try to answer this question. Oh, sorry. Uh this is supposed to say chat GBT, huh? Apologies. So here are our findings. top URLs in AI mode and SERs have significantly more backlinks than in chat GBT. Um from here we can see the box graph that more than 75% of the 3 million URLs across all three um sources are um hovering within the uh 200 to 400 um backlink ranges um all across the board uh from positions one to positions 10 especially for SERs and AI mode. The chatbt in particular um seem to have their top 10 URLs not needing as many uh back links as uh traditional search and AI mode. Okay. Um what we do notice is that position one tend to have more backlinks uh across all three sources than the other positions and in general there's a much wider spread than the other uh positions. Um we do note that um across all of these um from positions one to positions 10 it does not tend to uh affect so the an increase in backlings does not um result in a dramatic increase in your uh chances of ranking in higher positions based on what the top uh 3 million URLs seem to uh suggest. Okay. Similarly, when we looked at the um number of referring domains that these same 3 million URLs have across AI mode and SERs and uh chat GPT, we see that there is more u referring domains um required to appear in the top ranking URLs for both traditional search as well as AI mode. And again, chat GBT has significantly less and and and again it does not vary very much between uh the different top 10 positions. Uh we see that only you the first position having a much wider spread from like almost no referring domains to more than 300 referring domains uh in the top ranking URLs uh especially for position one. Again, it does not seem to vary very much, but we notice that a minimum number of both backlinks and referring domains is required to be in the top 10 positions in the first place. It just doesn't vary too much. So, there seems to be like a threshold and then after that um maybe other factors u start to play more into um getting cited more into uh AI answers or to appearing in higher positions in search. So, then we look at domain rating. So, how does that affect? So we look at both quality and quantity of back um uh link authority. So domain rating is the kind of proxy for us to assess the quality of uh domain authority or link authority that a top ranking page has. And we see that there is a very widespread and in fact it's even less of a discrepancy across all 10 positions across all the modes. It just seems that there is um a wide variety of domain ratings that is uh that any of these top URLs tend to have across any of the sources. Um, but we noticed something about all three and that is that more than 75% of the URLs in the top 10 positions have about 40 DDR or higher with the medium being around like um domain rating of uh around like 60 to 80 or around around that side, right? That's across all top 10 positions. So, what does that tell us overall? It says that in both AI and search pages with almost no backlinks or like very low authority basically never get picked. some minimum amount of link authority is important and that would be important not just for your own website but also um when you prospect um third-party websites to build mentions or to build um links from the these are the things you have to take into consideration and it's not just the domain of that uh particular website that you want to uh build links from but also the pages themselves that you're looking to rank. All right. And so when you get approached or as tomorrow will share later on, when you start to look into the link building tactics and if you're building on new pages, you have to consider the fact that um links need to be built to those pages, you need to consider maybe that if it's if you're building mansions or links to an existing page, are they in line with the other um top ranking URLs that you're trying to compete with? Uh because it seems to vary on industry. We looked at 3 million URLs across the three modes. Um it would also vary depending on the industry and the kind of keywords you're trying to target. Um as you can see that there is a wide spread. So that spread will narrow down once you're focused more onto your niche to to basically understand what is the minimum number of URLs and uh domain authority that's required to start getting mentioned in AI in to start getting uh rankings higher in search. So, um I will now pass back the mic to Oh, no, sorry. Um I want to do a quick plug for brand radar, which is the way that you can look at the topsighted pages for um your brand as well as against your competitors. And this shows in brand radar not only what pages are ranking the top, but also the kind of AI responses and the queries used to generate those responses. And like and it's sorted by default by number. So you can see that some pages are cited way more often than others when it comes to either a brand or particular niche you're trying to target. And you can also sort that across um different brands mentioned as well. And you see in this particular uh example, you can see that the the top u link being cited here is uh actually YouTube video. So uh one of the newest indexes that Brand Radar allows you to search right now is YouTube. uh where you can see for any URL you can see whether a a video is having a mention of your brand or your industry in the video title or the description or even the transcript to see um how your brand or a niche or a product is being mentioned as well as the context. This allows you to see uh ways in which your um your current brand presence has in the in the video space as well as opportunities to work with creators or influences to grow that over time based on what already exists on the web. Uh I've also included a quick link uh that you can scan QR and learn more about the deter the different top brand visibility factors especially uh referring to like um the mode similar to what we discussed today. Uh especially that one section about um YouTube where it is especially lucrative niche for newer brands that are starting out these days. So you can definitely check that out if you have the time later on. And now I think we'll bring that back to Tamara. I'll let you um take over the stage tomorrow was muted. Sorry, I'm back. So um very interesting data and thank you constant so much for um you know putting everything together and analyzing so it gives us more insights into uh what's going on at the moment and uh I saw an interesting comment uh from the chat uh regarding the domain rating so I will just quickly uh answer that because it's related to what we're showing on this slide. um we are not looking just at the but it's one of the only credible metrics that are actually easy to calculate uh for the backlinks. So it's not so easy or transparent to calculate relevancy at the moment for the back links. So uh we are using DR as uh a main um kind of a main metric for uh link evaluation still but I do agree with Thomas that it's not the only one to to use and we will see why and uh I will explain this in a few slides as well. So to wrap up the data set and to tie it uh together with the link building strategy and how we see it from the link strategies perspective uh SERs and AI mode and anything that Google algorithm evaluates uh still relies on the external uh signals on the backlink value. So the data show that higher position usually um receives more backlinks. So it means that the relationships between uh different websites are still important and moreover uh the more relationships you have with um active and highquality websites the better you will uh also um rank in Google's eyes both in SER and uh AI um side of Google. So um the vote of credibility is still important in that way. So link building is uh still kind of based in those values and authority is used as a sorting signal. But on the other side uh chat GPT applies a little bit different logic. So uh by the deduction system we we can see that uh domain rating and external factors are not so relevant. Uh we don't know why for sure. It could be because of the scraping uh um possibilities or uh the AI LLMs not being able to retrieve that much information. So they are only basing it on the context and structure of the content. So the DR spread or those uh core backlink uh metrics are not that um you know universal. So uh any kind of uh size or uh strength of the domain can appear and authority doesn't increase cleanly by position. So if um it can happen that some higher um uh higher ranked uh domains don't have such crazy or uh high DRS which is interesting. So a kind of a different uh angle of looking at it. So uh now we move from the cool interesting data set to the strategy part. So um I will help you with um applying this framework by splitting the budget and showing you the stages uh how uh how it works and uh how you can scale this onto and apply onto any size and any uh market or country uh for your strategy. And uh I like to run this in stages as I said. So we don't overbuild or we we don't guess anymore. Uh we know that this works because we are applying this into our uh daily work for hundreds of clients every month in Bazoom. Um and we build the baseline first. So um for the credibility and then we split into two different stages uh on the same level. So you can either choose the SER direction and build those traditional backlinks and strengthen it even more or you can build uh a little bit different backlinks for JPT for example. So um but building the baseline first uh gives you the safety to test and try out uh all of these different tactic tactics because you are standing on a solid foundation. So each of these uh stages has its importance in place and they are not so stable with each other. So uh as we said the baseline uh should build you uh links for credibility. Um so your page is not invisible at all. And here you want to do a mix of different kind of backlinks. They don't necessarily need to be super high quality but you need to start from somewhere. uh stage two uh building for SER will close the authority gap and you will probably use a bit more co competitive or a bit more aggressive link building which is fine because you already have the baseline and the stage 2B uh it just sprinkles a little bit uh of those back links that will um potentially give you visibility in AI sitations and push you into the conversational traffic because if you remember Today we are we we are having two audiences so we we want to appear in both for the same budget preferably. So uh to build a solid baseline uh you uh need to go into the mindset where one link per domain is enough. As constants uh mentioned before, you can have so many backlinks from one referring domain, but it doesn't necessarily mean that all of these backlinks will trigger uh visible signals. So, we like to prioritize unique referring domains. And uh we want a natural looking portfolio with clean anchors. Uh we want the velocity that also mimics uh natural growth. So, we don't want to push from zero to 100 within a week. um that rarely looks uh organic to either Google or um other systems. So uh we don't want to trigger any spam and uh usually we can do this through blog or guest posts, link insertions, uh PRs that are very popular right now for either do follow or no follow back links and unlin brand pensions. So um these uh type of uh links are the most common ones and uh the ones that are usually doing the best uh work for your external signals. Um now I will show you a quick example of a short campaign I would say that lasted less than 3 months. Uh uh you can see the average values from our um quarterly report uh from a bazoom report. And uh this is just to show you how baseline uh works and uh how the progression mix uh can look like in reality. And uh even a small campaign can work when the placements are legit, relevant, and consistent. And it doesn't need to take you a fortune or a long time to reach your goal which is very important and we see that every day with clients. So you can see here that uh we built 26 back links for less than 3 months. Um uh it says the total ordered was 26 because we also account the other factors like people factors. So if you're building a link campaign, you might get your link taken down uh after a few weeks uh which is unfortunate situation but there are some factors that can affect your strategy even though you do everything right. So uh there is always some kind of risk but uh with this uh strategy we uh managed to keep up all the 26 back links. You can see the average values of organic traffic uh which is the most important one and the domain rating and of course the average price per link uh which is important for business factors. Uh the strategy was uh as I said uh conducted throughout um approximately 3 months in a few different stages and it was a crypto niche. So I picked this deliberately to show you a very competitive niche. So uh also a niche that um tends to be shadowbanned because of its nature. So um crypto links are sometimes also regulated in different countries depending on their local uh laws and regulations about crypto trading. So um we had to take into consideration not only relevancy for this strategy but also uh those uh people uh factors that I like to call them. Um we also had to cover uh internationally. So US was the base and main market but we also wanted to trigger signals for this for this client in Europe and Asia as well. So there was a little bit of German and um links for from uh India, Hong Kong, Singapore etc. So um we had to do a lot for uh this budget and uh because of that we mixed a lot of tactics and the final goal of the strategy was to start ranking the client in organic uh rankings but also they wanted AI visibility because uh not only because of uh the the current trends but also because crypto was apparently very uh active in AI results. Um, this was actually a very good start for us because it was a younger domain. It was not uh still stable with traffic. It had traffic from many different countries. Um, and they didn't really have a quality uh backlink portfolio. Um, the good thing is that they only worked with Vizoom at the time. So, we could easily isolate the results or test uh and isolate the results uh efforts that we did. So to start with any kind of strategy for baseline uh I want to give these tips that we use in our everyday and it's also scalable to any market uh you can apply it into any size of the budget etc. So this is what uh I think is uh valuable for links and what works. Um so topical and intent match uh the relevancy of course. So um you want the same niche and uh preferably same search intent as your target page. So you if you are in a certain niche uh stick close to topical categories within that niche or close to that niche. Um my suggestion is not to publish uh links on general websites that have all kind of categories. Um then you want to nail the page quality and the content. Uh you want uh real content that's tailored to your niche. Uh clean structure is always um a go-to. Internal links that will activate the page um and actually make it visible not just because of your links but also because being valuable to the website that you're linking on. And uh you want a natural um link placement within that content. So you don't want your anchored link to just appear all of a sudden in the content. So um not only the the natural placement but also the position uh of the link. You want it to be as high as possible within the article. So um why is this important? Uh people just like to say this and move on. But there is a reason for that. Uh the reason is because of the scraping and um crawling uh way. Uh so usually when you are on the top of the page or closer to the top of the content you get visible before uh the rest of the content. So you get kind of prioritized by uh your position and of course surrounding as we said you want to be surrounded by relevant copy and uh not just in the footer of the page. So um and to wrap this uh tips uh you want the metrics for the website where you're posted to be stable and uh preferably growing. So we want this website to also live on and your page to receive continuous value long term. You want the website to have healthy anchor cloud which you can easily check in aircraft site explorer in the backlink section. So you can check what kind of anchors are linking uh to and from this website. You don't want to see a lot of spam there. Uh especially not in do follow links. And you want the website to have uh preferably positive backlink ratio. Uh outgoing and incoming links. So they're not linking out too much value. They are also receiving some value at the same time. and the websites that are linking to them are also not low quality or spammy because that means that your uh your article and your page with your backlink will get continuous value. So, and also these tips you can use at any time and you can apply at any stage of your strategy. So I would use this in your everyday work whether you're working with an agency evaluating their own uh link opportunities or if you're doing it inhouse this is the best framework you can use. So for this crypto strategy to go back to our example um at the baseline stage we focused mostly on helpful content because uh we saw that this content carries the more trust signals uh than just any kind of content like PR or branding and the content was editorial quality but not necessarily long or excessive not like two or 3,000 words. uh we mixed uh we diversified this content. So it was it varied between 400 words and uh one and a half thousand. Um it's not really uh it's not a uniformed uh strategy. So uh this also makes the link look natural and gives uh both Google and AI something meaningful to associate your brand with. So you're kind of uh helping somebody hopefully hopefully a real person is reading this article and saying oh this brand gave me good answer. I might click on this or I might um visit or remember this brand in the future. So it's not just the algorithm crawling your backlink but also the people um getting the value from your back. So here we can see just a quick examples of titles and topics of these articles for the crypto client. So uh different languages as I said but also different um um different context that helps people. And these are the results after two uh a bit more than two months of linking. Uh I picked the US uh results because we did the most links in on the US websites and um these keywords that we targeted were in the mid to higher uh difficulty. So there was some competition there. Um search volumes were not so crazy. So because it was a very niched uh product and very niched search but uh we did uh manage to gain some traffic from zero to starting to gain a lot. Uh so throughout these two months uh for some keywords we reached top 10 even top one which was uh amazing results um knowing the budget that I showed you and the the resources. though we could see that um applying all of these steps and uh quality assurance was the way to go for this strategy. Um moreover um this is how it looked like in uh all other metrics uh in aircraft. So our authority increased not only through um the traffic uh we can see uh from the locations that there were many different traffic sources. Uh the main was uh for us the US and we also saw the increase in uh domain rating. uh we are not using this as a primary um goal or any kind of goal in a strategy but it does show us that uh the vote of credibility grew and that the quality of the backlink portfolio grew. So uh we we have like a 100% confirmation on the stability of the back portfolio which um reassured us that reassured us that in the future cycles of the strategy we can focus on some different things and experiment and test more for AI. So um and on the left side you can also see the AI sitations which is an interesting part and this is how it looked like in AI sitations um after those two months. So um we started the strategy in late August with the baseline links and you can see a visible jump in the AI sitations as well. So we knew that this strategy uh covered both uh organic and AI results. Um as I said you need to diversify in the baseline stage. Uh usually it's done by adding generic or brand uh brand links to your uh articles to your pages. Um, and we like to do it uh maybe 50/50 split or 30 70 split uh in favor of keywords. But there should also be the brand mentions and uh I like to use uh unlin brand mentions for uh this stage uh a lot. You can do this either internally um uh if you have an outreach team or through an agency, it doesn't really matter or maybe through a PR. Uh so there are different ways to do this but um quick way to see the opportunities is to use content explorer in aircrafts and this is how it looks like in practice. So you would use uh the content explorer to mention your brand name but exclude your own domain. So you don't want to see pages on from your own website of course. And then uh I like to use uh I like to see the best links. So I would usually start from DR20. Um honestly that's the minimum threshold and as Constant mention Constance uh she mentioned before that um links above DR40 are usually appearing in uh top results for SER uh in AI mode. So, uh that kind of uh confirms my uh experience and um uh thoughts on uh DR because I honestly didn't see many low DR websites helping although they are relevant and good to have but for some more aggressive growth uh going from DR 20 or maybe DR30 uh should give you the better links that have more impact. Also, you you want to see websites that have some traffic going on. So, I usually take either 500 or or 1,000 average monthly traffic. So, I know the website is not dead and it has some kind of activity. And then you can just play around with other filters and and um kind of sift through and find uh good opportunities that still didn't link to your website, but they mentioned your brand name. So you can reach out to them and ask them for a link back to your website. So moving on from the baseline um you want to uh go into the stage uh for SER for example you picked that direction and this one is a bit more aggressive but you still have a lot of control and the whole point on this stage is to get linked from domains that already perform well in your niche so we know that they actually bring some value. Um the most um effective and popular strategy for this section is the competitive uh analysis or competitive link building. So you want to close those uh referring domain gaps between you and your top performing competitors and you will have to compare yourself with the top ranking URLs and identify the gap and the distance but do not focus on DR here. You want to focus on uh what kind of referring domains and how many uh there are that you are not covering and uh you want to build links that are within your range. You don't want to go too far. So uh we just want to cover what actually works and then move on from there. And uh this is how you usually do it. Um the the process I'm going to show you uh can be found straightforward through link in uh uh link intersect part in aircraft site explorer. So it will give you straightforward access to um the results but I also like to do it from uh another site uh because I want to sift through the top competitors in a different way. So uh we knew that for this client for the crypto client in the strategy we uh targeted uh the most important keyword uh as you can see on your screen. So I wanted to see which websites are actually ranking and performing good for this keyword so I know what I'm competing against. And then I wanted to see the overall intent of these pages. So uh not only the link quality and referring domain numbers but also what kind of intent dominates uh these rankings and what are they covering that may be valuable for us to know. Um you also want to look at pages that you can realistically outrank. So uh in any of the strategy I'm not going to take into consideration Amazon pages or trust pilot or Reddit or anything like that. uh looking at only the metrics because uh let's be real uh we're years and billions of dollars behind those brands. So you want to to find something that's um more uh that's looking more similar to your own brand but better. And then you will open it uh open the results that you want to see in the link intersect. Finally, uh you then will be able to see all of the overlaps and gaps uh between all of these competing pages. And you will want to enter your target uh and see um uh the overlaps. And the final step is to look at backlinks that competitors have but you don't. And then you're going to export uh this and use it for your either outreach campaign or send it to your link building agency or a market. Check in the marketplace. We usually do that for clients in the Bazoom marketplace. We would export uh these findings after filtering down and see uh how many of those link opportunities we have in our uh inventory portfolio and then build links to uh clients websites um in that um kind of strategy. Um and to save your budget uh please skip websites with no organic metric. It's a no deal. um you will save time and the budget. So once you have uh the gap list as I said you can either reach out or um you can send it to an agency and ask them to reach out for you. Uh that is also an option. You can um purchase those links uh or you can use a marketplace. Either way, uh there is always a way to gain access to your links, especially if you have a proof that your competitor has backlink there. So, it's very easy to argument it. Um you also want to identify uh relevant categories to your business and you want to ignore the irrelevant ones. So if uh some of the backlinks are placed on maybe forum pages or something that's not really valuable to to uh a business like yours, uh you can skip that or build links that are better uh or more relevant in the similar quality bracket. Um, and please keep in mind to check uh any lo local regulations or um to to see what is safe in your industry because sometimes there are advertising uh uh laws in certain uh parts of the world that will um require you either to disclose relationship with the website through the backlink or not build the backlink at all. So uh you need to keep this in mind especially if you're working in competitive niches. Uh there is a fun and quick boost as well uh as a bonus tip that we like to do in competitive markets which is called tier 2 strategy. So it's basically refreshing an existing uh strong asset and supporting it with another uh smaller set of links. Uh the main thing here is not to overdo it on the websites that you are linking from as well. So you don't want to have the same backlinks as your uh tier 2 page. So uh you want um you don't want to recycle and you want don't want to trigger a PBN scheme. So that's the most important but it's a very nice and quick boost for your ongoing strategy. And uh finally the stage uh 2B and I suppose you've been waiting for this since the beginning. So it's the AI path AI citations and specific specifically chat GPT in this uh example and uh we will show you how to build links that are designed to trigger this sitations and conversational um visibility. So, as we've seen from AIS's earlier studies, uh, AI or LLMs love to pull answers from tutorials, guides, and resource pages. So, this means that unlin mentions can also matter. It doesn't need to be uh strictly do follow link because remember uh LLMs are crawling in a different way. So the key here is to mention your brand or uh mention it close to the keyword uh and the context you want to be in. And um it can be useful that these pages uh or these domains already use uh citation tools and sources in their content. And I would um advise you to treat the backlink page the same as you treat your own page as well because you want this page to rank as well. You want this uh guest post or blog post or PR page to be visible in um in search as well. Not just because it contains your backlink, but because of the long-term context. uh make the structure of this article also easy to skim and quote. So these uh sections and splitting the content and um making chunks of the content is uh very um favorable by AI and CHP specifically. So you want to add some stat as well some um linkable assets uh for example as well some data uh etc. also important to add uh the author uh schema and timestamps that make your content uh more credible uh in the back end. So remember to treat your page uh externally the same as you would your own content. Uh this is one of the examples that we did uh in the recent weeks uh for a for a client. So it was um not a typical guest post more like a granular tutorial format. Uh we mixed do follow and no follow links. So uh we triggered a lot of those unlin brand mentioned signals with a very helpful content also very chunked. So we kind of uh checked out all of these uh important signals and uh constants showed you how to use brand radar. So, uh it's a great option to find also competitors that are appearing in AI sitations and uh they don't necessarily need to be your business competitors. You can also learn from the pages itself that um that are ranking in AI sitations and see what kind of content AI prefers in your niche. Uh as we said before uh nothing is universal and uh you need to find your own um kind of point of view but you can still uh compare these findings in the site explorer and then v um kind of measure uh the gap and the overlap. So, uh just pick one of the top AI cited pages that you find in brand raider in any of the AI um uh AI mode or AI overviews or IGPT. Uh pick one that seems like the best uh the the best performing competitive page and uh open it in the site explorer and then compare all of these values that we showed already. So there is a usually a misconception that um just because a link works for example in SER that uh it may work in all other places. But uh some of the I would say black hat tactics uh as I saw from many our um client uh issues that um those aggressive strategies usually don't bring a lot of uh visibility in all the places we want to cover. So I've dealt with a fair share of fixing uh clients websites from uh after using blackhead tactics elsewhere. So they came up to us in Bazoom and they wanted help uh from us to refresh and kind of cure their uh backlink portfolio also keyword portfolio. So uh I just uh compared and wanted to see how uh those kind of cases if they if AI uh really cares about them or not. So uh I found some interesting uh things to show you. Uh one of the cases we had to fix was keyword boosting. Uh this is a very popular uh kind of black hat tactic that uh sends uh too many signals uh thousands uh hundreds or thousands of signals within a few hours or a few days. Uh it just sends them to towards your website. So it kind of triggers uh temporarily triggers a lot of interest in your website which can be done either through backlinks or keywords. So if you uh happen to see uh some anchors coming into coming towards your website um in a uh you don't know where they're coming from. H it can either be uh either an attack or you've been caught uh into a PBN scheme uh by linking on a lowquality website or you use the keyword boosting service and this is how it works. So uh from this easy example we can see that um traffic was growing. Uh we can see that uh it kind of looks uh good on paper but we can see that all of other um metrics especially impressions are not doing very good. We can see the two boosts uh of referring domains that happened. So uh this kind of graph I don't like to see. If you only check the organic traffic, it could look uh lovely. It would be a great business case study for your services. But if you turn on everything else, you could see that it's not really uh so beautiful and um it doesn't look really healthy for your website. Uh moreover we can see that the backlink portfolio port portfolio suffered uh although the gain within the six months was uh almost 100,000 backlinks. Uh you can also see that they're not coming from that many referring domains which is also um worrying and kind of a red flag. So we know that authority suffered but we do see a lot of traffic coming in and to confirm all of this we don't see any kind of um visibility in AI which uh makes me think and wonder why this happened. So I wanted to look what happened with the keywords that were boosted. Um and we could see that if we just look at this upper uh screenshot, we can see that uh the results look amazing. Uh the positions uh within the 6 months were just amazing considering the volume and the competition and the keyword difficulty. You would think that this strategy uh was super successful. But I wanted to see do follow uh background from uh this uh keyword boosting and I wanted to see what kind of links were actually doing this. So when I went to the backlink uh history and and uh explorer I could see that uh these back links were just as toxic as possible and uh a lot of spam was going on. So this made me worry and I actually had access to Google search console from this client. So I wanted to see how this actually looked like in traffic um and from the Google side. So for the same keyword that we saw uh in the previous slide, the Google search console looks honestly very sad. uh we can see uh almost 500,000 impressions uh but only 51 clicks for this keyword which uh even if you don't know advanced SEO uh you could use basic logic and uh come to a conclusion that this is not healthy and this is not bringing anything to your business at all. So um do not use keyword boosting services uh for a long-term strategy uh or AI visibility. That's the whole point. So there is another way uh that um is popular today uh especially in competitive niches but not very useful for long-term SEO or AI which is parasite SEO. And uh this page was uh successful in uh the Swedish market also covered some uh US traffic as well. And uh as you can see it had two um life cycles uh two chances to live on but it could not survive without the second tier uh support unfortunately. And um even though it had a lot of traffic and a lot of keywords ranking uh throughout time, it didn't really have that much authority or fresh content or relevant content to appear in AI sitations. So um and at the end of the day, it was a oneshot um boost uh very short term. So it didn't really bring much. But if you are looking at uh trends, parasite SEO might uh step stand out as a very popular one. So um I'm just uh uh advising you to think twice uh before using this kind of strategies. So um to wrap this all up, um if you only remember one thing from today, uh make it this. Um there is no things such as universal uh strategy or link list anymore. Uh there are frameworks and scalable tactics tactics that you can use uh and test out. Um decide what you want to do for the next for example 30 or 60 days if you're starting today. Uh what you want to do uh with your strategy. Do you just want to improve rankings or do you just want to focus on traffic or your brand presence which is very popular? Um and then uh through using these stages that we showed today, you can build accordingly. You can also use the data we showed you today also by constants. if you want to delegate this to your bosses as well because we know that um link building still has tough time um taking out a little bit more budget. Uh speaking from personal experience in Bazoom. So um you can use all of this data to um advocate for your strategy and for your test because now you have the proof that it's actually working and an easy way to scale this. Uh you can use ars anytime to validate any of this data and um it really makes it easy because you can see both the gaps and both the AI sitations and you can also reach out to me and Bazoom to uh advise you or help you out with your strategies and maybe tell you our experiences from different markets. So, uh, links still matter and, um, they are still a powerful tool, but today it's important where and how you place them. Uh, so be mindful and use our data and let us know how it goes. And now we can uh, go back to constants and take the questions and talk a little bit more about everything we showed. There'll be questions that might be either to tomorrow or me. Um, so I saw some questions that were in the chat. So if you asked a question in the chat, um, just know that I'm going to go through the Q&A uh, module first. The questions asked there and then go to you and hopefully the people who asked their questions earlier are still in the chat. So don't worry. Um, I think the first question is that I see here um, asked anonymously is for tomorrow. They asked a question about how should we deal with tons of Telegram SEO backlinks that are showing up to our backlink profile on hrefs. So if you're familiar with this strategy, maybe you can give some some feedback, some advice. Yes, I have I've been very uh well known with this strategy unfortunately and uh in recent month we had a lot of clients coming in asking for help um because it's it's a very annoying um influx of links uh and it's uh usually started from i gaming uh niche and competitive niches but now we see it in all other markets. So um how we deal with this is that we look if those links are do follow or no follow. Uh from my experience I mostly saw that a lot of them are no follow. So that shouldn't bother you too much if they are no follow. But if there do follow, I would advise you to um depending on the size of influx and uh intensity of this uh for example, if you have uh thousands of these backlinks in do follow coming in towards your website within a week, that should be disallowed uh immediately and uh disallowed through the Google search console. So even though a lot of people are uh trashing disavow and saying that it's not working anymore um I have this confirmed by uh people from Google search that disavow can still do uh favor in these situations. So it it's not going to harm your website but uh to keep the balance because you're going to get the uh large influx and then with the disavowing you're going to lose them uh in a very short amount of time. So that can also look very unnatural. So what you want to do in the meantime uh do not panic but uh focus on the baseline as we showed. you want to build a solid and safe and risk-free uh foundation uh that will um guide you through those uh hard times. So um yeah, if you have this do follow influx uh in a large scale disavow and build uh keep build uh quality and good links to uh keep it safe. But if it's uh maybe 20 back links per month or if there are zero/zero uh metrics, they have no value. Um Google also said that they are uh able to ignore those back links and not treat them as your uh legit backlinks. So depends on the intensity of them. That would be my recommendation. Moving on to the next question by Adam. Uh I I will give like an overall answer and then if tomorrow if you have uh some like experience on this end you can maybe share. So the question is should we focus on getting back links from sources cited in chat GBT and AI overviews and overall like if you're looking at the pages that get cited in chatgbt and AI overviews just you have to think about fundamentally what's happening is that these pages are getting AI is scraping them and like um getting sections of it to generate you source them to generate their answers. So based on how your brand appears on those pages, backlink or not, that will be that will affect your brand, right? That would affect your brand's uh impression. So uh I mean overall uh you should see what these pages are doing in terms of like what's the purpose? Are they answering a question? Are they a list of like best resources to recommend? Are they criticizing your brand? Whatever it is, right? And based on that you you you can decide how you want to either link or get in touch with the website owner to uh fix any issues that are there. Yeah. Uh yeah I I agree with that uh as well because as we said before AI uh most of the LLMs that are not Google's um AI systems are not able to see external uh relationships or we are we don't have the confirmation yet. So we don't know if AIs are uh able to see how many backlinks uh each page have and rank them accordingly and the data also show that. So uh yeah focus on what the page itself shows and you will get your answer to how to tailor your strategy towards that. Yep. So hope that is useful Adam. Uh, next person asks, "Can you expand a bit more on treating guest posts as the same as our own?" Uh, yeah, I think yeah, tomorrow I think you can. Yeah, sure. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so uh I love this question because it's something that people uh usually tend to skip in their strategies. They treat guest posts as just uh the the lowest part of their strategy and content. But if you just ask yourself uh do I want my backlink to be visible and uh as we have seen from the results backlinks are not uh by default visible just by being linked as do follow. You need to make the backlink u live in this system. So the backlink needs to have a purpose and it needs to be uh in a content that's that's actually indexed and preferably ranks uh for some relatable keyword. So um what does it mean treat your guest post as your own page? Uh it means uh optimize the content in a similar way. Uh because you you want your brand uh to appear in a quality content in relevant context um not only on your website but also through a backlink. So you want to expand this relevancy and credibility and uh eat you want to expand this onto your own backlink on another website as well. That's the main point. So um for example we we implemented started working with hybrid type of content in bazoom uh in 2024 and we tested out a lot and we came up with uh some kind of a I I don't want to say perfect but very wellbalanced uh longer uh piece of content that actually has it's not just a chunk of large paragraphs without that just write any generic topic in your industry. But this kind of articles actually have infographics or they have uh a meaningful uh consistency. So people can actually read this and maybe click on your backlink in this content. So you want your backlink to be on a page that um somebody will actually value. So uh when they are transferred to your website by clicking they actually get the answer they uh want to know. So that's the whole point. Um, you don't have to write super long content uh necessarily for your guest post, but you want to write content that actually indexes in anyway. So um when you decide on the website that you want to link on, so uh the media that you found um to publish your guest post, you want to see uh and analyze some of their uh content as well. and tailor your guest post that so that it looks natural in their own article portfol port portfolio. So it doesn't stand out uh because there is less chance than uh the article will be indexed. So there are some ways that you can make sure that this happens and um I know this because we uh for some time we we had a lot of de-indexation uh issues and then we uh analyzed and went into uh the problems and uh saw that there is a pattern that we we kind of need to uh treat guest post not just like any piece of content just you know the main purpose is to have the backlink you know the main purpose is for article to give value and your backlink happens to be there as an extra value to the reader or the algorithm. So uh then uh after fixing this and after um making sure the content matters first uh next to the relevancy then we saw an amazing improvement in both the delivery indexation and the visibility of our uh guest post. So yeah like guest post even on other websites are basically another extension of how people are going to perceive your brand. So if the quality is not the same then like people think oh the quality of uh what people say about your brand is different on different places it would like basically affect the trust people associate with your brand. That's a good question. Exactly. Yeah. Uh Sedarth um your question is how to measure the impact of links built on citations that AI is using to fetch data and information from since those resources keep changing frequently would they decrease in value by the time they get indexed. Um maybe I'll I'll answer this question. Uh I mean from what we see I think we recently did a study on this which is that the sources do indeed change a lot. AI seems to mix up or or like they they tend to site different links frequently when answering a question not only in the same time period but even for the same uh for the same term or a similar space uh even for different locations around the world. So um so what should we do about that? uh fundamentally even though we see that the sources changes but the answers and the context of which the questions are being answered they tend to stay the same more or less and this can only be achieved if uh as a overall strategy for your brand is that when you do your link building or improving your mentions or PR to get your you know your name out as a as a brand that they are consistent across multiple brands. So um yeah, if if you are trying to measure like per page like how important or how successful it is, a basic metric would be to see how like how often it is cited and how it is cited in AI answers. But as a whole, it would also be meaningful to do like a content audit and analyze like is your brand being discussed or being talked about in the same way across multiple websites. You could have um there could be for example recently there was a page that we had that was being cited a lot that actually all the information was outdated that's going to affect the way that AI talks about your brand right so so in other words there's a way to quantify it by just like things like number of mentions or citations but also on a qualitative basis where you look into how the uh the mentions happen and what sort of pages get mentioned ideally you should therefore build across multiple pa multiple pages and see and measure your brand rather than individual pages. So, I hope that helps to answer that question. Yes. Um, Daniel asked the question of should I have a goal of reaching or beating the amount of referring domains my top competitor or should I focus on quality over quantity when it comes to budget decisions at tomorrow? At tomorrow. Thank you. Um I get this question every day for for a long time and uh you people usually think that when you do a competitor um analysis as a strategy in links um they think you need to uh just duplicate or mirror exactly the same links and the number of links that your competitors are doing. But uh the practice didn't show as much um didn't show that those results are necessarily uh tied to the exact number or size of your competitor's links. So my advice here is to and something that we we use on a day-to-day basis is that uh you take a look at um yes you use the competitors referring domain portfolio as your base. So you want to see uh how many links, what is the quality as we saw from the examples, but uh you really don't know um when the competitors acquired those back links. You can see the history. So maybe you can see that they acquired some very strong links back into in 2021 for example. Um, but uh those that link can maybe have 10,000 in traffic right now, which may seem like a you know solid link uh medium to high quality, but if you go into site explorer and see that this website in 2021 had 2 million traffic or 500,000 in traffic and dropped to today's 10,000, um, that doesn't look like a super good link anymore. So for for that reason I wouldn't mirror um the competitor's backlink uh 100%. I would have a look and um kind of evaluate what kind of backlinks are dominating their portfolio and uh how frequently they update or what is the velocity they are gaining uh month over month. So I would focus more on this kind of information more than just uh replicating it uh you know oneonone. So uh basically use that referring domain data um mimic to an um some point. So maybe you want to uh duplicate the websites that are being built in the last 6 months. For example, if you see that the competitor is very active lately in link building. So that is something that is safe to uh use as your own resource and duplicate because you know that it worked recently. Uh, but if it's something that's old and not so quality anymore, uh, I would skip that and I would maybe build a link on a new website that, um, is within the quality range and within uh, the relevancy in your own industry. So something that's uh, working today, that's quality and stable today, but that uh, has similar metrics to those old links. uh it can also affect um that competitors domains are maybe older than your own domain or maybe their own page was very active at the time so they were gaining a lot uh not by backlinks only so for those reasons I don't like to duplicate it uh you know 100% but still use it as a guidance more than just you know expert list and uh do exactly the name. Uh so yeah. Okay. Hope that was helpful. Um someone anonymous asked apart from the offlink building strategy, what on page strategy have you seen contribute the most impact to campaign performance so far in getting them cited in AI platform? So this is kind of outside of link building as a whole. We we covered uh some part of this not all on slide 47. Uh tomorrow can you go back to slide 47 where we shared about like how to format content. Yes, just a second. So on this particular slide you can see that we we talked about and and like the the suggestions here are how to format things on page. Um they look very similar to just traditional SEO and in this case we do see that to be um there's some overlap in things you can do which is good news. that means we don't have duplicate work. But yeah, to like structure things um within multiple headers, try to answer questions in different sections rather than just have a whole long body of text. Uh that seems to uh help in some way or um in both traditional search as well as AI. Um there and this is mainly for a blog format. I mean there are other also formats where like their best lists or free tools and stuff like that. So um but primarily if you want a lowh hanging fruit way to like an optimize things on on page just start with this guide and if you see that you're not finding any performance apart from that maybe you can reach out to your agencies or for for like a deeper analysis and audit. So something else might be happening there. Okay so I hope that's useful. Um, next question. Is there some ratio? Christopher asks, "Is there some ratio between mentions and citations you should achieve to get a good percentage?" Uh, I don't know if you have an answer, Tamara. I think we don't really HRFS, we have not really done any analysis on this. So, I I also don't think uh it could be measurable because um the results are changing uh more frequently. So, uh it's not the same like with the ratio of uh backlink mentions and referring domains. So, I I wouldn't care about that. I wouldn't stress about this. And just focus on good quality mentions and citations, I would say. Rachel probably doesn't, you know, we we don't know. There are more things to focus on basically. Yes. Yeah. Uh, Bonnie Santini, Santani, sorry, asks, "I have a question regarding backlink relevancy. When we're building a backlink, how far should we go in checking the relevancy? For example, is it okay to choose a domain that's slightly off topic? Let's say you're a software development company. Is it fine to select a SAS website to build a backlink from? Um, the guest post content and topic will be around software development services, but since the SAS domain, does it still count as relevant?" Interesting question. Uh, yes. Yeah, it's a very good question and uh a very good uh point of view for the relevancy. Uh some um some businesses tend to overfocus on the relevancy. So they only build back links on high relevancy websites. Uh which is good. I'm not saying it's bad, but it will make your portfolio look very uh you know uniformed. Um we want to diversify a little bit. So, uh you don't you also don't want to link a lot on uh websites that look like your competitors as well. So, keep that in mind. Um it's good to be linked primarily on uh those high relevancy websites and as you mentioned software developer linked on a SAS um website. I I don't know if it's a blog SAS blog that just publishesformational or educational content or is it a resources section on uh SAS uh service provider so it can also be different but uh as long as you are within your topical area um not 100% closed but you can also be uh linked on a tech website or tech news or software developer news or maybe um a software um developer educational blog or uh resources for young software developers etc. Maybe even um I don't know which software development niche are you in but for example if you are in automation or uh you can do like a robotics uh kind of uh content so you can see the point of this uh it doesn't need to be strictly high relevancy but uh it needs needs to make sense. So if uh I will I will take another example. If you are a e-commerce shop for let's say uh women's clothing and you want to be linked on a men's uh blog so men's lifestyle blog, you need to tailor that content uh because your page is highly targeting female uh audience not male audience. You need to, for example, uh make sure that your backlink is placed in an article on that men's blog. Uh it's placed on um content that talks about women's clothes in a normal context for a man's blog. So, uh maybe a boyfriend wants to gift uh a piece of clothing to the girlfriend. So, you have this kind of context. So, it wouldn't make sense to have a completely woman's clothing article on this website. So uh it will look too artificial and too forced um which is also uh we see this a lot um from from Google perspective uh Google doesn't like to index those kind of you know cross relationships uh that don't really make sense. So you should also pay attention to that. So, as a software developer uh service, you don't want to be linked on, for example, um maybe sports uh website or something that doesn't really make sense. It may cover in general a similar audience, for example, a large pool of audience, but it doesn't really make sense for you to be linked there. So um yeah there there is um you need to think about it more uh for the relevancy but uh as I said don't stress out too much as long as are you within your own topical area uh something that really makes sense for software developers then you're good to go just focus on the content and as we said on on the page where your backlink is. So, it makes sense that it's linked on that website specifically and it gives value to its usual readers. Okay, I'm gonna go through three questions that were asked in chat. I'm sorry they may not be here, but I think it's best to quickly answer them. We'll just give quick answers to them. Uh, one question is [clears throat] by Rick who asked, "Does a media website with multiple categories be a good fit for a company tech reseller?" So I think it's similar to the question asked earlier in terms of relevancy right? So I think go ahead. So that you so as I understood uh you're asking about a website with all categories like general or I I think that was the context. Um if that's the thing uh you're asking I would skip this because um you may nail the content itself on the page but uh the the the website in whole uh will not give you so much credibility because it covers many other um niches that are not so close to your topical niche. So um it's okay to have this kind of links but don't use it as your uh as majority of your strategy. Yeah. And uh next question is why is it better to apply one domain per link? Is it good to get many different links from one trusted domain? Uh do yeah I can also cover it. Yeah. So um I'm not saying it's bad to have many backlinks. It's actually okay to have multiple backlinks on different pages from the same domain. Um, they they still have some value, but the first backlink usually gets the the the most uh signals from. So, it's the first time you're being connected to this other website and it's the first time Google sees the relationship between the two of you and it's the first time you're getting the that uh famous link juice that uh is everybody's talking about for backlinks. So every other time, every next time you're getting another backlink, uh there is less value being transferred in technical ways. Uh in contextual ways, in semantical ways, it's always good to have more backlinks. But the more backlinks you have from the same domain, the less um value they bring you technically. So uh for for those reasons we like to have those uh unique uh referring domains uh which means that you're getting um new connection new relationship with this link. It triggers more fresh signals basically. So uh yeah just uh mix it up. You can have those uh you can have maybe like 80 or 90% of your strategy focused on unique referring domain. So you get many fresh signals linking back to your website and you're making your website more popular among other in your niche. And then you can also use uh the websites that worked well. For example, we have clients that are publishing um in specific niches. They like to publish multiple backlinks throughout the year on the same domain. that's pretty badass in the niche that has super high metrics that's publishing a lot of credible and popular trendy content in in their specific niche. So, they always benefit from having a backlink here and there again from this website. So, it's not going to do any harm, but uh you can use it for some different goals than just uh ranking up. If you have uh five people that love to talk about your brand versus 500 people that uh have seen it and they generally recommend your brand, well, which one is more impressive? So, that's kind of like that mentality you can take into it, especially if you're starting out with your link building strategy. So, that's like a way to think about it's a very good angle. Yeah. like you can it's great to have five people talk you know like rave reviews about you but like when you have 500 people that are willing to vouch for you that's even more impressive so yeah uh I'm gonna so we are reaching like the 30 minute over mark so I'm going to give um the vote for tomorrow to answer two more questions in the Q&A so you can look over and see which two questions you'd like to answer I think this anonymous person is the looks like the same person. So, you pick two last two questions to answer and then um and then we'll call it for the webinar. Mhm. Uh yeah, we can go with the first one by Daniel. Okay. So, do you look at unique referring domains per page or should it be unique referring domains per domain? Wouldn't I get value on a page level if I get a backlink from an amazing site even if I already have a back if I have a link from another other pages? Uh we look at the unique referring domain uh compared to your whole domain. So we want that initial connection as the unique part of this um strategy. So but you can use both. So um it it's not going to um do any harm. Uh but for uh the things I explained in the process, I was referring to those unique domains uh for for your whole domain. That's the answer. Okay. Uh all right, last question. Pick one. Pick any. Yeah. Um yeah, let's do the last one. Last one. Okay. Yeah. Uh, what are the outcomes of building links or publishing articles and general niche websites instead of niche specific ones? Is there a complete waste of resources or are they measurable benefits? Um, I think I already um actually replied to that now that I remember. So, the the general websites uh can be good. They they usually tend to be strong PBNs. Uh if you don't know what a PBN is, it's a part of a blog network that's linking uh across uh the network to each other and they usually have the those general categories. Uh these are not news websites. News websites are a bit different. They still have a lot of credibility but they do have uh they they tend to have different categories like economy, sports, uh daily news, lifestyle, etc. But um they are still relevant to the readers because they refresh content every day and talk about trendy topics. But though those other websites that are just like blogs but with a lot of um distant topical categories. Um so they can have health, family, tech, uh adult uh and in the same um in the same uh category section which is not really it doesn't really look like a credible source for a specific topic. So uh these kind of websites tend to uh get less indexed. So there is a risk of your article being lost w within all of these different topics and all of these two different too wide signals. So I would recommend staying away from them [clears throat] um unless they are uh you know older domain that already has a good reputation and it covers like a magazine or uh something like that. Uh but otherwise just skip it and don't bother wasting your budget on that. Okay. Um and that's unfortunately all the time we have. Thank you so much for your quite cool questions actually very meaningful questions about backlinking and backlink strategies and how to go about in 2026 how to put your efforts and spend your money and convince uh your team and how to uh focus your link building efforts moving forward. Uh thank you everyone who have stayed um all the way to the end. Like honestly pretty cool that you stayed along. Hopefully the Q&A was useful to you. And just a reminder that when you close this webinar um page window, you will get a a link to a survey that you can fill out to give us your feedback on what you liked about the survey and how I mean uh today's webinar and what you like to see improved as well as suggestions for what kind of content you would like to see in future webinars uh as we uh plan to host them later in the year. Um again, thank you so much for um joining us today. We're glad you came with your time and thank you for your questions and and hope you find things useful. Um we hope to see you guys in future webinars um coming up and as as usual if you have any questions about Bazoom or like to know more about Hrefs in general, you know how to contact us uh for uh questions uh later on offline and yes and recording of course will be on YouTube since we're live streaming there. You can watch it again afterwards uh once this webinar ends. Okay. Uh thank you again everyone. Take care. Uh have a good week ahead and we'll see you guys in the next one. See you.