Chris Panteli: Digital PR, Brand Signals and the Zero-Risk Link

Chris Panteli is co-founder of Linkifi, a done-for-you digital PR link building agency that earns tier one media coverage for its clients. His argument: you give up control of the page, the topic and the anchor, and in return you get the one kind of link Google is never going to devalue.

"There's almost no chance that Google is going to devalue the BBC or a link from the BBC anytime soon. So it's like a zero risk game, digital PR."

Chris makes the case with his own client list, Jeremy brings a real negative SEO case, and ChatGPT's visible sources show where the next links should come from.

Read the full recap, with the quote cards and the money-page method: Chris Panteli on digital PR, brand signals and the zero-risk link.

What Chris and Jeremy cover

• Why the Linkifi clients that came through the helpful content update were the ones with a real brand, and why "the brands that have an army of fans will be the ones that survive the longest."
• Branded anchor text over keyword anchors: Joe's Pools, not "Nashville custom pool designer."
• Why digital PR is almost exclusively a homepage link, and why topical relevance is mostly out of your hands when a journalist is writing the story.
• The money-page method: pull a competitor's links to one specific page, bucket them by type and check the anchor distribution.
• Penguin as a head game, link sludge from content farms, and why Google ignoring bad links cuts both ways.
• Chris's three questions for any link strategy: tolerance for risk, what your industry is doing, and your budget.
• What ChatGPT actually cites: tier one media, YouTube transcripts, Reddit threads and listicles, including small niche blogs that might amend a list for a fee.
• Whether AI tools are fit for purpose, the training data problem, and why podcasts are the fresh content the models want.

Related episodes

Cyrus Shepard ran the disavow test that did nothing and lands in the same place on brand signals. The case for why earned links are about to matter more is in links are getting rarer. Ann Smarty covers LLM consensus and Reddit, the citation side of this conversation. Martin McGarry, an ex-black hat on the spam flooding Google, is the other half of the link sludge story. Jeremy's reference to Melissa Popp is from Go Fix Your Google Business Profile, and Cahill Camden makes the case for podcasts as a trust channel. Chris is also quoted in SEO Arcade's roundup What SEOs Are Actually Handing to the Robots.

Where to find Chris

Linkifi's free digital PR cheat sheet walks you through landing your first media links yourself, through journalist request platforms like HARO and Source of Sources. Chris also co-hosts Market Movers.

Recorded August 2025. Host: Jeremy Rivera. Guest: Chris Panteli, co-founder, Linkifi.