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:
Previous people might have known him as SEO Autopilot. There are quite a lot of different SaaS tools and software now that Elias owns, so I’m not going to dig too deep into your background, Elias. I think a lot of people will have seen previous videos about you — previously a pilot from Greece — but I want to dig straight into Stealth Code and the different products that you have.
James Dooley:
If you just give a one-minute background of who you are, then we’ll dig straight into the tools, products, software, and what you’re doing nowadays.
Elias Livadaras:
First of all, thank you for having me, James. I’m the co-owner at Stealth Code, a software development company that specialises in SEO software. We are proud owners of SEO Neo, SEO Autopilot, Omega Indexer, and CoLink, and we are constantly creating new software and new modules that help business owners and SEO experts rank their websites all over the world.
James Dooley:
That’s a great introduction. Obviously with Stealth Code, I’ve used all four of the different tools: CoLink, which is like a Google crawler, Omega Indexer for indexing, SEO Autopilot and now SEO Neo. I’m excited for SEO Neo’s APIs to be coming out.
James Dooley:
It’s a new tool on the block for auto link building and that’s the main tool I want to dig into a little bit deeper, because this has progressed a lot. What I love about your developers and programmers is that the whole team understands SEO, whereas other tools out there are built by programmers who don’t really understand why people want to use the tool. Your team understands SEO and keeps breaking the SERPs, keeps pushing the boundaries of what’s working with link building.
James Dooley:
I want to dig mainly into SEO Neo, but we can touch on the others as well. So first and foremost, a question I get asked a lot about your SaaS and software is: can SEO Autopilot or SEO Neo be used for tier-one backlinks, or are they just for tier-two backlinks? What are your thoughts?
Elias Livadaras:
Definitely you can use both tools for tier-one backlinks because there are so many high-quality and authority websites in both pieces of software that there’s no reason not to point those links directly at your money site.
Elias Livadaras:
You can get links from all major public Web 2.0s or major public authority links. You can get backlinks from Pinterest, Weebly, WordPress, Tumblr, Goodreads, Issuu — you name it. We have hundreds of high-quality backlinks that you can point directly to your money site.
James Dooley:
For anyone watching, expanding on that as a user: I use it both directly to my money sites and also to my tier-twos. If I go and get some guest posts and I want to power those up, you’ll hear a bit later about Elias’s strategy about RD100, where he talks specifically about each URL trying to get 100 referring domains.
James Dooley:
How many of you are building guest posts and not powering those guest posts up? You should be powering them up. You should be indexing them as a start, then powering them with tier-two and tier-three backlinks.
James Dooley:
Digging deeper into that — we do use it this way as well — I think I’ve heard you say this in other interviews: would you want Pinterest or Tumblr linking directly to your money site, as long as it’s relevant? Of course you would. Even non-relevant links can move the needle, but if it’s a relevant Pinterest link, of course you’d want that pointing directly at your money site.
James Dooley:
So yes, the answer for me is: it can be used for tier-one and tier-two purposes. I just wanted to hear it from you. Now I want to dig a little deeper into image ranking specifically, because a lot of people ask about ranking web pages but they’re not checking image rankings, and a lot of SEOs don’t know how to rank images.
James Dooley:
People go out there saying, “Go and buy this Fiverr gig and get your image shared on other Web 2.0s,” but what I don’t hear people saying is, “Go and use SEO Neo or SEO Autopilot to rank your images.” Can you share one or two strategies for people who aren’t using SEO Neo yet — what you recommend for ranking images in Google Images?
Elias Livadaras:
Sure. For me it’s quite easy because I use four strategies. The first one is pretty obvious: you take your money site’s URL and use those URLs and images inside a multimedia-rich article on Web 2.0s or PDF upload groups, and then you build tier-twos to pass authority to your tier-ones and your image will get the credit.
Elias Livadaras:
The second strategy is I take the image URL itself and use it as the “money site”, so I build links directly to the image URL.
Elias Livadaras:
The third strategy is to take the image URL, create an iframe, and use that iframe inside a Web 2.0. Then I use a different strategy and diagram to create “image stacking”, because I interconnect these assets strategically so the authority from the lower tiers passes quickly to the tier-one, and then you can rank the image.
Elias Livadaras:
The fourth type is a combination of all previous three, and it’s really easy to rank images nowadays with that.
James Dooley:
So to recap the first strategy: you’re taking the image from your money site, embedding it natively in the Web 2.0 or PDF upload, no direct link back to the image URL, and via link inversion your site is stronger so your version of that image ranks, not the duplicate, because your page is stronger than the host page. Correct?
Elias Livadaras:
Exactly. That’s correct.
James Dooley:
Perfect. Moving on to video rankings. I know quite a lot of people are using your tools for video rankings. What strategy do you recommend for ranking videos both in YouTube and in Google’s video tab?
Elias Livadaras:
Since we’re going to use Google assets — the YouTube URL — we can be super aggressive. Again, there are three main strategies. The first one is to get the video embed and use it on link groups that allow multimedia-rich content: Web 2.0s, PDF upload websites, and cloud links or cloud blogs.
Elias Livadaras:
We can talk later about cloud blogs because I think they’re a real game-changer in SEO now. I build a lot of tier-ones using the YouTube iframe.
Elias Livadaras:
The second strategy is to use the YouTube URL itself and be more aggressive with anchor text. I’ll use at least 60% exact-match primary keywords, 30% branded keywords, and 10% generic or plain URLs — just for Google’s eyes.
Elias Livadaras:
The difference is that for tier-twos I do a comment blast: I create 200,000 blog comments using SEO Neo. That does the job.
James Dooley:
So with that second strategy, those links are directly to the YouTube URL, no embed, just straight linking with anchor text, mainly exact-match anchors?
Elias Livadaras:
Yes, exactly — that’s it.
Elias Livadaras:
And in all strategies I always, always index my tier-ones with Omega, and I use CoLink, the Google crawler, for all my tier-two and below.
James Dooley:
Let’s talk about that, because that’s one of the questions I had. What’s the difference between Omega Indexer and CoLink?
Elias Livadaras:
Indexing has two phases. The first phase is crawling — Googlebot crawls your page. The second phase is indexing — Google stores your data and decides whether to index it.
Elias Livadaras:
Indexing these days is very difficult and expensive to achieve at scale. Many users use crawlers like CoLink. If your link is getting crawled, then it passes link juice — that’s a fact.
Elias Livadaras:
So if you don’t want your tier-ones to show in search, you’ll just use a crawler. If you do want them to show in SERPs, then you use an indexer that handles the full process.
James Dooley:
So CoLink gets Googlebot to crawl the page. What’s Omega then doing on top of that to get it indexed in Google?
Elias Livadaras:
There’s a cheaper way and a more expensive but more effective way. The cheap way is to use a Google crawler like CoLink to crawl your links, then do a comment blast. The combination of those two eventually leads to indexing.
Elias Livadaras:
If you want to make sure that in less than 14 days your assets get indexed, you use Omega. It really comes down to budget.
James Dooley:
Moving on from that, obviously a hot topic is GMBs — Google Business Profiles. I know a lot of people have success using what you talk about like cloud blogs and GMB stacking. Can you explain how people can use SEO Neo to rank their Google Business Profiles?
Elias Livadaras:
This is one of my favourites now. Again, I have three main strategies. The first one is what I call “branded GMB”. I use only three GMB URLs: the main GMB URL with the CID, the review URL, and the post URL.
Elias Livadaras:
What I do is use multimedia-rich assets because I want the GMB map embedded on those assets, and I start using anchor text — primarily branded. I build tier-ones and tier-twos in the normal way.
Elias Livadaras:
The second method: I create a heat map with a 13x13 grid — 169 circles. Then I go to each circle, get the coordinates, and create direction URLs to my GMB. I copy the link Google produces and build a list of 169 URLs.
Elias Livadaras:
Initially I take all 169 URLs and do a comment blast, again using Google assets so we don’t care about penalties. I create 200,000 comment blocks to start moving the needle.
Elias Livadaras:
Then I imagine the 13x13 square as rows of 13 URLs. I take each row and create separate campaigns to build super-high-authority links to each row. I use Omega to trigger indexing; I know those links might not all index, but I want them crawled.
Elias Livadaras:
I keep doing campaigns until my heat map is fully green — that’s positions one to three across the grid.
James Dooley:
Do you ever expand the radius once you’ve got that 13x13 all green, or do you just keep it in that core area?
Elias Livadaras:
I’ve never really expanded beyond the mapped area, because we don’t sell SEO services directly to clients. But we do a lot of tests with friends and local businesses, like a friend with a restaurant in Athens. In four months the results are amazing; give it a couple more months and everything will be green.
James Dooley:
Let’s jump onto the RD100 strategy. A lot of people talk about this. Can you explain what the RD100 strategy is?
Elias Livadaras:
Yes. I’ll give an example. Many people complain that in every Google algorithm update they lose half their PBNs, or they say they’re doing press release campaigns but don’t see results, or they do guest posts and don’t see results.
Elias Livadaras:
The main problem is those assets have outbound links but zero inbound links. The ratio of outbound to inbound links is negative, which is a huge red flag for Google.
Elias Livadaras:
For six years now I’ve seen that tier-one URLs with at least 60 referring domains perform way better in the results they deliver to your money site. I’ve done a ton of tests and seen huge spikes in rankings even for competitive keywords.
Elias Livadaras:
So for six years I’ve used this strategy. It’s Google-algorithm-proof. You’re not doing anything crazy black-hat or unnatural — you’re just powering up your assets, which is totally logical. You’re building links for two reasons: to pass link juice from lower tiers to tier-one and then to your money site, and to keep your PBNs fresh if you own a network.
Elias Livadaras:
So the concept behind RD100 is that we always build roughly 100 referring domains to each of our good tier-ones.
James Dooley:
There are so many people doing guest posts or PBNs and, yes, they might buy a powerful domain initially, but with link loss the referring domain count goes down and they’re not building new ones. It doesn’t even stay the same; it declines. They keep linking out and then wonder why they’re hit by an update — and honestly, they deserve it if they’re not powering their existing properties.
James Dooley:
Moving away from that: a random question about SEO Neo. What type of clients are actually using it? Do you have SaaS companies, local lead gen, affiliates, e-commerce, SEO agencies — what’s the mix?
Elias Livadaras:
We have all of the above. But after the conference where I spoke in Arizona — SEO Spring Training — we’ve seen more agencies start cooperating with us. Big US agencies.
Elias Livadaras:
We also have people selling gigs on Fiverr with huge success. Basically, if you want to rank in Google, you can use SEO Neo.
James Dooley:
To be honest, that’s where I was going: anyone who wants to rank higher in Google or Bing, or rank images or videos, should be trying the tool because it doesn’t matter if you’re SaaS, e-commerce or local SEO — it’s the same algorithm.
James Dooley:
Let’s go into SEO Neo, which in my opinion is a more advanced version of your previous tool, SEO Autopilot. Within SEO Neo, what I love is that you can create your own diagrams of tier-ones and tier-twos. You can even go to tier-three and tier-four backlinks.
James Dooley:
I think I’ve heard you say you’ve got some campaigns that go 10 tiers deep, which is pretty impressive. I’ve never gone that deep — I’ve gone down to tier-fours to power up tier-threes and tier-twos and then tier-ones, which power the money site.
James Dooley:
Within those diagrams there are a few different types of links: social bookmarking, Web 2.0, authority links, PDFs, URL shorteners, wikis, profiles, and so on. For people who look at these diagrams and think, “What is that?” can you explain what social bookmarking is in your tool, and which link groups you see as the most beneficial if someone had to pick just a few?
Elias Livadaras:
The way you use a strategy is important. All the pre-made diagrams are my own strategies that I share with everyone because we want everyone to succeed.
Elias Livadaras:
As a rule of thumb in SEO Neo, you want to use as tier-ones only link groups that are high-authority: Web 2.0s, authority links, PDF upload sites and high-quality social bookmarking. Those are your quality tier-ones.
Elias Livadaras:
Social bookmarking sites are websites that allow you to store your favourite web pages in one place. You give a title to your web page and that title becomes the anchor text, so you’re using your keyword as the anchor and your target URL is attached to it.
Elias Livadaras:
Web 2.0s everybody knows; we support all major ones. Authority links is a great group that has only a title — the anchor — and a short bio, so you can use authority links to increase your domain authority and page authority.
James Dooley:
On your tier-two diagrams you’ve got URL shorteners, wikis and profile links. For anyone that doesn’t know: those are just used at tier-two? And then you’re using CoLink to crawl those, and for tier-ones you’re using Omega Indexer?
Elias Livadaras:
Yes. SEO Autopilot and SEO Neo are tools built by SEOs for SEOs. There are pre-made strategies, and a ton of features an SEO can use, but my opinion is: it’s not the tool that makes you rank, it’s you as the SEO expert and the strategy you implement. That’s why we built the diagram editor, so every SEO can implement their own strategy.
Elias Livadaras:
You can use all the link groups, but as I said, use the four or five main groups for tier-ones. For tier-twos it doesn’t matter as much what you use.
Elias Livadaras:
URL shorteners are a very good group to trigger Google bots. Profile links and Web 2.0 “links” (not blogs) are just links that move juice. As an SEO you need to understand what each link group does.
Elias Livadaras:
We’re always happy to help SEOs understand better. We have advanced support and a strong Facebook community where everyone can ask anything.
James Dooley:
Can people use CoLink or Omega Indexer for properties that aren’t built with SEO Neo or SEO Autopilot? If I bought some guest posts, could I use CoLink or Omega on those too?
Elias Livadaras:
Yes, of course — I think it’s a must. You can build 1,000 links and, without crawling or indexing, Google might find them after eight months. It’s imperative for all SEOs to use either a crawler or an indexer.
James Dooley:
Within SEO Neo or SEO Autopilot, regarding tier-one and tier-two links, how is the content written? Do you have to provide it and then spin it, or what are you using?
Elias Livadaras:
This is one of the main differences between SEO Autopilot and SEO Neo. In SEO Autopilot you had to provide and spin the content yourself.
Elias Livadaras:
In SEO Neo we use new technologies. We’ve implemented OpenAI, so you can import your OpenAI API key and create unlimited articles directly from ChatGPT.
Elias Livadaras:
Last week we also added custom prompts — before it was only default prompts. Now you can create whatever content you want. Your life is much easier with SEO Neo.
Elias Livadaras:
We also have a module called “Wizards”. In Wizards, say you have an e-commerce website with 30 category URLs. You can choose a strategy, for example “From Zero to Hero”, and you put in your inputs once. The software will then create the equivalent number of campaigns based on your targets.
Elias Livadaras:
If you’ve got an e-commerce site, you do your inputs for an hour and the software will run campaigns for 30 days for you. When one campaign finishes, the next one starts automatically, so you gain a ton of time.
Elias Livadaras:
This is how our e-commerce clients scale: they schedule two- or three-month campaigns, then focus on other things like press releases, while SEO Neo runs in the background. OpenAI helps a lot with that.
James Dooley:
For anyone watching, I’m asking Elias questions I actually know the answers to because I use the tool — I just want to highlight why SEO Neo is amazing and some advanced tricks you can do.
James Dooley:
Because you can use OpenAI to write content, what a lot of people don’t do is utilise these Web 2.0 properties not only for link building but also for E-E-A-T signals. This is part of E-E-A-T SEO.
James Dooley:
You can use SEO Neo to not only build links to the site, but also to mention the author on third-party websites and build their experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.
James Dooley:
There are companies that have won many awards but don’t shout about them. Instead of just using SEO Neo for link building, you could use the content to shout about the awards you’ve won, which again is a big E-E-A-T signal because your author and brand come across as experts in that topic.
James Dooley:
It’s a huge benefit to use SEO Neo for E-E-A-T-driven link building strategies.
James Dooley:
Another example: when we publish Google News articles, the minute we push a Google News article live and then use your tool to push links through to that article, there’s a buzz of virality around it. Combined with social signals and CTR, your do-follow links make that article explode into Top Stories and into Google Discover.
James Dooley:
People often ask, “James, how do you get so many sites into Google Discover?” and it’s that virality you can trigger the minute the page goes live.
James Dooley:
I feel like a lot of people talk about SEO Neo or SEO Autopilot for images, videos and GMBs, but they don’t talk enough about it for E-E-A-T, reputation management, Google Discover and branding.
James Dooley:
We also use it heavily for reputation and crisis management. Can we get all your branded pages ranking, not just your site? We build tier-ones and power them with tier-twos to push down any negative content. SEO Neo is one of the best reputation management tools out there; people just think of it for ranking.
James Dooley:
When we’re stacking our tier-ones, tier-twos and tier-threes we’re trying to utilise the content not just for links, but for E-E-A-T, branding, reputation management and Google News / Discover.
James Dooley:
I wanted to say thank you, really, for the tool you’ve made. It’s clear that you and your team are SEOs first. The product is great; we use it day to day for so many things because traffic diversity is key now — getting traffic from as many sources as possible, not just Google web search: Bing, Google Images, Google Videos, YouTube, Google News, Google Discover.
James Dooley:
Do you have anything to add on how others are using it for Google News or brand reputation?
Elias Livadaras:
Most SEO agencies all over the world are missing this opportunity around reputation and crisis management. Reputation management is easier than crisis management, but since we live in a crazy world with scandals every week, it’s a big opportunity.
Elias Livadaras:
Ten years ago there was a huge scandal in Greece with a big pharmaceutical company. I was confident I could handle their crisis, so I emailed them and showed them their results — nine out of ten results on page one were negative.
Elias Livadaras:
I took the job and after eight months there were only positive results. You could say Google.gr is easier than Google.com, but crisis is crisis and reputation is reputation. At the end of the day, SEOs and agencies need profit, and this is a profitable service.
James Dooley:
Another thing you talk about — and I don’t really hear others mention — is link source diversity. I’ve always been a big advocate of pillowing and foundational links: getting link-type diversity, anchor-text diversity and as many referring domains as possible before we even start on guest posts, niche edits, PBNs, etc.
James Dooley:
You talk a lot about link source diversity too: getting as many different link sources as possible to your site. That’s something we’ve now started doing much more of: can we get image links, PDF links, not just contextual links, and so on.
James Dooley:
Link source diversity is something I only really heard from you, and we’ve adapted that strategy into pillowing — building naked URLs and branded anchors first, then moving into more exact-match and LSI anchors. Do you want to expand on link source diversity and pillowing?
Elias Livadaras:
Yes. Personally, I do pillowing only with URLs for the first month. We have a strategy called Domain Authority Stacking where we use only Web 2.0s and no anchors at all — not even generic. Just 100% plain URLs.
Elias Livadaras:
That way, in the second month we’re 100% sure we can start building exact-match anchors and doing link diversity in a more natural way. You can then use another diagram, like “Data Loose”, which is a very good diagram to use after your plain-URL pillowing.
Elias Livadaras:
Link source diversity is what you called link type diversity. We need backlinks from different HTML codes and different platforms. That’s why we use WordPress, Joomla, social bookmarking sites with different codebases, and so on. That variety produces amazing results.
Elias Livadaras:
Also, in SEO Neo we have a special module for self-hosted WordPress. So to power up your PBN, there’s no need to touch each site individually. If you have a 300-site or even 1,000-site network, you can upload SEO Neo and create a specific diagram according to your needs.
Elias Livadaras:
You can schedule campaigns for a year using OpenAI content. You can build content to your PBNs for one year and you don’t need to do anything else.
Elias Livadaras:
If you’re a link seller, those PBNs will be getting fresh links and more traffic, so you can start charging more per link. It makes sense to treat your PBN almost like a money site and keep growing it.
James Dooley:
First and foremost, anyone who hasn’t used SEO Neo yet: check out the link in the description. I’ve got a testimonial and review there from myself about SEO Neo — I even get you on that video as well. I strongly recommend anyone who hasn’t signed up yet to do so.
James Dooley:
Away from the tools: if someone wants to come and see you at an SEO conference, which ones are you going to this year or next? Is there anyone you want to shout out who’s helped you in the SEO community?
James Dooley:
I know you talk highly of people like Terry Samuels and Clint Butler and SEO Spring Training, which I’m definitely trying to get to next year. Terry’s asked me a few times and it’s just been bad timing with kids and my partner being pregnant, but I definitely want to get over and network with that group. Are there any other conferences you recommend where people can meet you?
Elias Livadaras:
First of all, SEO Spring Training was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. The people, the Samuels family, the other speakers, the networking — it was an amazing experience. I met a lot of new friends that we’re going to cooperate with personally and through Stealth Code.
Elias Livadaras:
The next conference I’ll be speaking at is SEO Rockstars on November 11 in Vegas. Then on March 5th 2025 in Miami there’s SEO on the Beach from Michael Merlino. He’s a cool guy; I love him.
Elias Livadaras:
We’re also preparing our own SEO conference in Greece, hopefully at the end of June 2025. This is an official invitation for you to come as a speaker in Chania in Crete — it’s very beautiful there.
Elias Livadaras:
And of course SEO Spring Training next year; I think it will be early May rather than April, but yes, those conferences for sure.
James Dooley:
Terry Samuels has asked me to speak there and I’m trying to move a few bits around, but I definitely want to get out there next year. I love the crowd and the community.
James Dooley:
I want to wrap up by saying thank you to you, Elias, for the work you do and how much you help the SEO community. Sometimes it might not be noticed by the masses, but there are thousands of people whose lives you’ve changed.
James Dooley:
The tools you’re creating help them grow. Personally, I want to say thank you. That’s why I wanted you on — I love Omega Indexer, I love CoLink, I liked SEO Autopilot and have now moved onto SEO Neo.
James Dooley:
From me: thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure having you on.
Elias Livadaras:
Thank you very much, James. The pleasure is ours that you show such trust in our company and software. With your help we’re going to become even better. We’re going to add modules, and if you find something that works, we’ll be happy to implement it in SEO Neo and our other software.
Elias Livadaras:
I’m going to see you at our conference next year — or earlier at a conference in the UK.
James Dooley:
I’d love to come over to Greece; I’ve got one or two Greek partners in some businesses as well, so I can kill two birds with one stone and get them to attend too.
James Dooley:
I also love that you’re already at the top with the best tool on the market, but you’re still consistently looking to improve. I love the attitude that every day is a school day. I always say to my team, “If you don’t innovate, you’re going to evaporate.”
James Dooley:
You’ve always got to be innovating and striving to be a better version of yourself every day. I love that if we think something could be improved, the minute we reach out to you, your programmers are working on it and improving it.
James Dooley:
That’s why you’ve got to the top and why you’ve got the best tools on the marketplace. From me: keep that attitude. Even at the top, don’t become complacent — keep striving to improve, because algorithms change and next week there might be a new system that needs implementing.
James Dooley:
Having that attitude is great for the community and the industry.
Elias Livadaras:
Thank you again, James.
James Dooley:
Cheers, Elias. See you soon.