James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley, Karl Hudson and Kasra Dash explain why blacklisted domains damage SEO performance because toxic links trigger zero value signals which causes rankings to drop. The conversation shows how a blacklist checker protects budgets because identifying spam sites prevents wasted spend on harmful backlinks. The tool matters because proactive disavows reduce penalties which improves long term stability.

Creators and Guests

Host
James Dooley
James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

James Dooley
Nowadays that's not the case and the amount of people still rehash the same old stuff and SEO myths that Google are good at ignoring links honestly it's the bane of my life. I purchased a lot of links over the years and I remember probably about two or three years ago you had recently purchased maybe 20,000 worth of links in one month a lot of the time. Google would do a very very good job of links that were pretty much toxic with just zero value. Checking your links in a blacklist checker would be very important because you're going to find out.

Kasra Dash
So today we're going to be talking about blacklisted domains. I am joined with Carl and also James. How you doing? So very quickly without going on a big massive rant why are checking blacklisted domains important?

Karl Hudson
Do you want me to go? Do you want James to go?

Kasra Dash
You can go Carl.

Karl Hudson
So I would say obviously checking your links in a blacklist checker would be very important because you're going to find out very quickly whether or not the sites are toxic. They have no traffic. They might be PBN guest post farm. You're going to very quickly find that out and potentially save money on investing in those links so it's a no brainer really.

Kasra Dash
What about for yourself James? So James you’ve purchased a lot of links over the years and I remember probably about two or three years ago you had recently purchased maybe 20,000 worth of links in one month for maybe four or five websites and fast forward six months later we actually sat there disavowing those links.

James Dooley
For sure. I mean there's nothing worse than you're paying money and wasting money and more importantly wasting time on buying links that are actually causing more harm than good. The amount of times that I've bought links and it's had a detrimental effect and I've lost rankings has been crazy. So having something like a toxic backlink checker is absolutely unbelievable. I wish it was here 10 years ago. When you say 20 grand a month there's some months I used to spend 80,000 a month and back then there was a lot of links that used to work. It seemed to be back then a lot of the time Google would do a very very good job of links that were pretty much toxic with just zero value. Nowadays that's not the case and the amount of people that still rehash the same old stuff and SEO myths that Google are good at ignoring links honestly it's the bane of my life.

Kasra Dash
With the recent algorithm leaks it is clear that Google does zero value links and there's people that are actually still purchasing links on some of these guest post farms on some of these PBNs etc. So that's why we have decided to create the domain blacklist checker. It will be on SEO’s website, it's going to be on Kasra Dash website, it's going to be on Carl's website, it's also going to be on FatRank. We think this is going to be really important especially if you are acquiring any links. We’ll do a very quick demo on how it actually works. It's very very easy to use and also if you guys think that we potentially don't have a set of links that are blacklisted feel free to reach out to us. We will obviously do some manual free checks for you as well. But very quickly this is what it looks like. If you paste in the links here click on check domains. By default it will give you two free checks and if you want the entire list all you need to do is provide your actual email and your website. Once you have got that it will unblur all of it for you. So as you can see Forbes, Magazine Direct and SERP.com they’re not blacklisted. I'm glad that SERP.com is not blacklisted. As you can see we've got ActiveRain.com, you’ve got TendersInfo. Some of these websites are actually getting a lot of traffic. They've got some serious DR. Some of them are DR80 plus websites but they don't actually provide any value. So in some cases other link building agencies would charge you for some of these links and they're not actually checking the blacklist.

We also demoed this with a few of our clients. These are some emails we've recently got back. “Hey guys I just wanted to say thank you for spam checking the list of links. I can't believe eight out of the nine backlinks I was going to acquire from X link building agency was marked as spam. You guys have saved me £1,800. Can I place an order with you guys?” That’s from John. Another email to Carl: “Hey Carl thanks for spam checking my existing backlinks. The annoying thing is my previous link building agency said they were doing this for the past 12 months. I've spent well over $60,000 with them. Can I start a campaign with you guys? And should I worry about a disavow?” Thanks Joel.

Kasra Dash
Very quickly James if somebody has got some toxic links that are sparking up in this tool do you think that they should get a disavow?

James Dooley
Yes for sure. I mean it depends on if they've been hit hard on rankings then you might need to go and get a specialist to come like Backlink Doctor to do a disavow file for yourself especially if you've got any unnatural link penalties. You need to do the disavow and the reconsideration request. Apart from that if you only have let's say a thousand referring domains and you're not thinking that you've got a penalty you can just go and get the list of URLs that are blacklisted and toxic from that list and just do it manually yourself. Load it into the disavow file yourself and on a done-for-you type service or like you said you can use a specialist to get it done. But I'm always like prevention is better than cure so I would always try to do a proactive disavow then try to wait and be reactive after you've been penalised because it's very difficult nowadays to try and recover sites when they've been in a penalty from Google. It can be done but it is just more difficult.

Kasra Dash
And just one thing to add to that this tool is only going to get better over time. So proactively looking at this tool it's free to use so I don't know why you wouldn't use it. If you check a link today it might be a toxic link or a blacklisted link in two or three months’ time so highly recommend you guys proactively check this out.

Karl Hudson
Have you got any ending points? No obviously I believe the list up to now is going to be around 700 sites in there give or take but going to very quickly grow because we have quite a sizable list. It’s just getting it into the right sort of setting or format for the tool. So like what Kasra mentioned before the link will be in the description check out the actual tool itself. It's free to use and give us some feedback. If you guys think there's anything that we've got wrong there is a big green get in touch button on all of the websites. You can get in touch and we will actually do a manual check for you as well. So I hope you guys have enjoyed this video and please remember to leave a like.