Episode Details

E1079: David Quaid returns to the podcast to talk through SEO myths that refuse to die, and why a lot of the current advice around SEO, GEO, AI search, backlinks, content, and LLMs is either incomplete or flat-out misleading.

We start with the SEO vs. GEO debate and why treating them like two separate worlds can lead to bad strategy. David argues that if your site cannot rank, cannot get crawled properly, and cannot build authority in search, you should not assume AI systems are going to magically find and trust you.

From there, we get into the myths people keep repeating about content, backlinks, EEAT, Gemini, toxic links, parasite SEO, expired domains, HTML sitemaps, and what helps a site rank in 2026.

Topics we cover: - Why "just build a good brand and AI will find you" is not a real SEO strategy - Why GEO does not let you bypass Google, backlinks, rankings, or authority - The problem with treating SEO and GEO as separate disciplines - Why "good content" alone is usually not enough to rank - Why overproducing content and landing pages can waste time and money - How Microsoft Clarity can show what users actually do on a landing page - Why people often misunderstand thin content, duplicate content, and information gain - The problem with surface-level EEAT advice like author bios, outbound links, and forced credibility signals - What David thinks people get wrong about the Google API leak - Why Google may have author-related and site-related variables without those variables meaning what SEOs assume they mean - Why backlinks still matter in 2026 - Why you do not need backlinks to every page - Why constantly buying more links may not help if you are losing or devaluing links at the same time - How to think about link quality beyond domain-level relevance - Why relationships, partner content, and real pages with traffic can still matter for authority - What David would do in the first 30 days of SEO for a new SaaS site - Why he recommends publishing low-difficulty pages early and seeing what gets indexed - Why he thinks an HTML sitemap matters more than most people realize - How an HTML sitemap can help both search engines and AI systems understand a site - Why toxic backlink reports are often more harmful than helpful - When disavowing links might make sense, and why that is rare for most sites - Why Moz spam score and similar third-party metrics can create unnecessary fear - How David thinks about expired domains and when they might be useful - Why expired domains are risky as a primary domain - How PBNs and link farms have changed as Google has changed how it handles link spam - Why "link echoes" may be explained by user signals and ranking history - Why a page can keep ranking after a backlink disappears - How relevance and authority work together in competitive search results - Why long-tail keywords can still work extremely well - Why the idea that "keywords do not matter anymore" usually comes from people who have worked on very high-authority sites - Why Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and other LLMs can give bad SEO advice - Why knowing what advice to ignore is the difference between an expert using AI and a beginner being misled by it - Why LLMs often repeat popular SEO myths because those myths rank on high-authority websites - Why technical SEO advice is often overstated for new sites - Why crawlability is usually more binary than people make it sound - Why XML sitemaps do not solve the authority problem for new websites - Why parasite SEO is not an automatic ranking shortcut - What people misunderstand about using Medium, Reddit, and other high-authority platforms - Why some SERPs are much harder to enter than others - How click history, backlinks, and relevance can make rankings harder to disrupt - Why "we know nothing about SEO" is also a myth - How reverse engineering search behavior can still teach SEOs a lot - What David changed his mind about after seeing how video content performed - The