Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Karl, you’re the founder of Search Hero and you do a lot of off-page strategies. Recently, a lot of people have been talking about virality and things going viral on social media. Are you a fan of social media traffic coming through these networks to your site? Do you believe behavioral signals and traffic help your money site rank better?

Karl Hudson: Yes, you should absolutely have as much traffic from various avenues as possible. Social media platforms—Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok—all are vital.

James Dooley: Do you feel paid ads can also work well? If I listed Twitter Ads, Pinterest Ads, Reddit Ads, Quora Ads, YouTube Ads, Facebook Ads, PPC—are there any specific platforms you're using right now that deliver cheaper traffic but are still on-point for SEO or link-building audiences?

Karl Hudson: YouTube traffic is great, especially for branded search. Google Ads is a fantastic platform. Bing Ads as well. Then you have Twitter Ads, Pinterest Ads, and TikTok’s ad platform—which we’ve tested and found quite cheap.

James Dooley: Let’s talk about SignalBoy. I was an investor early on because I saw the power of leveraging traffic, behavioral signals, and engagement coming through to a site. The developer behind it, Leo—brilliant guy—built a tool and strategy that leveraged paid ads and mass social media campaigns. It could push traffic from subreddits, Twitter hashtags, Instagram hashtags, Facebook groups, and more. The tool encouraged things like:
“Can you check whether this site loads where you are?”
“Can you search this branded keyword in Google and tell me what inner links show?”
“Can you click the footer links to see if they work?”

This produced branded searches and engagement signals that massively boosted rankings.

You’ve used SignalBoy a lot for tier-two backlinks and engagement. Would you also use it for citations?

Karl Hudson: Yes, if you want to help them get crawled and indexed.

James Dooley: Guest posts?

Karl Hudson: Yes.

James Dooley: Niche edits?

Karl Hudson: Yes—again if you want them crawled and indexed.

James Dooley: So basically social signals work for most links?

Karl Hudson: Correct.

James Dooley: Matt Diggity has said before that it’s not only good for virality and engagement, but it’s good to make sure your site gets traffic and social signals—otherwise it’s a footprint to build links to a page that has no traffic at all. Would you sometimes get traffic or signals before building links, then some after?

Karl Hudson: I would get some at the start. Usually we do citations first, then a press release, and with the press release we do a social signal blast. If news outlets are picking up the article, it makes sense that social media picks it up too. This justifies backlinks—press, social, everywhere—and strengthens overall link building.

James Dooley: Let’s move on to parasite SEO, where SignalBoy is used heavily. People get a great article written with the right semantics and entities, then use tier-twos and SignalBoy for engagement. Have you found that without SignalBoy it’s harder to rank parasite SEO pages?

Karl Hudson: Yes. We had a case study where within 24–48 hours of using it, rankings shot up—“rankings and banking.”

James Dooley: With SignalBoy campaigns—do you recommend one campaign per link, multiple campaigns, or reaching out for custom backdoor access for deeper engagement?

Karl Hudson: I’d definitely reach out. What’s on the site is great, but if you want strong engagement and virality, contact them directly. They can do far more behind the scenes.

James Dooley: I’m obviously biased as an early investor, but you’re more of a link builder than someone who does social media or paid ads. Would you recommend that anyone doing parasite SEO, guest posts, niche edits, or backlinks use a service like this?

Karl Hudson: Yes. I’d do social signals directly to the money site, as well as to top-tier links. If someone’s on a tight budget, choose the authority links—high DR, high trust and citation flow—and send signals to those. But it's all about justification: social activity explains why backlinks appear.

James Dooley: Many people don’t want this publicly promoted because they want it kept underground. If you’re ranking parasite articles, you must leverage engagement. Without tier-twos, without well-written content, and without SignalBoy’s engagement, you’ll struggle—even on powerful hosts like Forbes or The Jerusalem Post. Without virality you won't move.

I strongly recommend reaching out to Leo for backdoor access. That’s how the tool gets real people—like plumbing groups, SEO groups, whatever—to check your site, click pages, test the contact form, and engage. Those click-through and engagement signals work incredibly well.

Karl Hudson: One last thing: SignalBoy is also excellent for fixing cannibalization issues. On parasite sites, where multiple posts fight for the same keyword, we’ve seen SignalBoy engagement push the intended page to become the dominant one—number one in the SERPs.